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Center spins off international arm

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The Center for Public Integrity officially announced the spinoff of The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) today.

 “We’re intensely proud of the success of the consortium and also proud to have birthed it, nurtured it and sustained it for nearly two decades,”  said John Dunbar, chief executive officer of the Center for Public Integrity. “We wish them nothing but continued success.”

The ICIJ has tremendous momentum and its leaders believe it is ready to capitalize on its record of global collaboration and grow independently.

“As we begin this new chapter, we remain grateful to the Center for Public Integrity for its 19 years of collaboration and its ongoing support as we make this transition,” said Gerard Ryle, director of ICIJ. “We believe this new structure will allow us to extend our global reach and impact even farther and build on the lessons we’ve learned and the successes we’ve enjoyed.”

ICIJ was the creation of the Center’s founder, Charles Lewis. The ICIJ reached new heights in 2016 with the worldwide reverberations from the Panama Papers investigation, which it coordinated across a network of more than 400 journalists around the world. The effort recently won a George Polk award for financial journalism.

The spinoff received board approval earlier this month and the separation was finalized Friday, February 24, 2017. The Center’s board of directors decided that enabling the ICIJ to chart its own course will allow it to pursue new opportunities and options for funding and continue to pursue its crucial work.

"We wish Gerard and the consortium the best of luck in their independent adventure, and we at the Center look forward to creating other such great enterprises in the future,” said Scott Siegler, Center board co-chairman.

Begun in 1997 as an effort to expand the Center’s model of watchdog journalism worldwide, the ICIJ has developed into an unprecedented international network of reporters and media organizations, culminating in some of the largest and most complex journalistic collaborations in history.

The Center for Public Integrity has been a pioneer in the field of non-partisan, nonprofit investigative journalism since its founding 27 years ago by Lewis, an investigative journalist and former producer for 60 Minutes.

The organization won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism in 2014 for its Breathless and Burdened investigation and has been a leader in tracking the influence of money in politics, adding teams on the environment, national security, justice, economics and technology.

The Center for Public Integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/center-public-integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/02/27/20746/center-spins-international-arm

Trump pick for Air Force boss frustrated auditors with lucrative, murky consulting for nuclear weapons labs

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A federal inspector contacted the Energy Department fraud hotline a few years back to flag irregularities in contracts that several nuclear weapons laboratories had signed with a former New Mexico Congresswoman whom President Trump has designated to become the new Air Force Secretary.

A far-reaching probe ensued in Washington after the hotline contact, which ended in a demand that the weapons labs give back nearly a half-million dollars to the government. The former Congresswoman, Heather Wilson, has said she did not do anything wrong in trading on her Washington experience to become a “strategic adviser” to the labs.

But internal Energy Department documents newly obtained by the Center for Public Integrity make clear that some of the contracting irregularities stemmed from demands specifically made by Wilson in her negotiations with the labs.

Wilson's nomination now represents the last chance for President Trump to get one of his first choices for service secretary installed. Army secretary nominee Vincent Viola, a Wall Street trader with a personal net worth estimated at $1.8 billion, withdrew from consideration on Feb. 3. The challenges of breaking ties with his businesses “have proven insurmountable,” Viola’s camp said in a written statement. Then on Sunday, Navy secretary nominee Philip Bilden stepped aside. He cited worries that submitting required ethics documents describing his business connections would cause “undue disruption and materially adverse divestment of my family’s private financial interest.”

If confirmed, Wilson would oversee billions of dollars-worth of military work by the Lockheed Martin Corp., whose subsidiary ran one of the nuclear weapons labs that hired her from 2009 to 2011, starting a day after she left Congress. Wilson’s work involved using her contacts in Washington to try to gin up new federal business opportunities for the privately run weapons labs.

But the labs got into trouble by billing the government for her work, and one of them was accused of effectively using federal funds to lobby for more federal funds, a violation of law, according to the Energy Department’s Inspector General. The lab’s manager, the Sandia Corporation, agreed to pay a total of $4.7 million dollars to the government to settle the case, although it too denied any wrongdoing.

According to investigators, Wilson refused from the outset to provide a detailed accounting — at any time — of how she did her work while earning fees from Sandia and from the Los Alamos National Laboratory totaling $20,000 a month.

Refusing to account for her time constituted an exception to DOE contracting rules, and it flummoxed some of those within the department, and even within the labs, who were tasked with ensuring that taxpayer funds were being prudently spent, according to notes kept by the investigators who probed the contracts. The contracting officials became upset about the arrangement, and one of them eventually rebelled by blowing a whistle through the hotline.

Two paychecks for one meeting, auditors said

They complained in part that Wilson’s silence about how she spent her time had blocked their efforts to determine whether she was billing the labs fairly or improperly collecting fees from more than one laboratory for doing essentially the same work. They also expressed uncertainty that Wilson had met a contractual requirement that she devote 50 hours a month to meeting each of the labs’ needs.

On at least two occasions while working as the head of a consulting firm she established after leaving Congress, for example, Wilson occupied a single seat at government meetings in Washington, but collected two paychecks from firms running separate labs, which subsequently each billed the government for these expenses.

Wilson “billed both LANL [Los Alamos] and SNL [Sandia] full consultant costs,” inspector general investigators wrote about a June 2010 White House meeting Wilson attended. “Invoices do not describe work performed that was unique to each laboratory.” She billed the labs in the same way after unspecified December 2010 meetings in Washington, DC.

“Due to the lack of work product, we were unable to prove or disprove the potential issue of duplicative services,” said Felicia Jones, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department’s Inspector General Office, in a Feb. 16 email to the Center for Public Integrity about the notes, which were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The contracts that govern federal payments to the private firms that operate the Sandia laboratory, based in Albuquerque, and the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory require clear evidence of the work that subcontractors such as Wilson conduct, as one of several conditions for reimbursement by the government. “Examples of such evidence are work products and invoices with sufficient detail regarding the time expended and nature of the actual services provided,” an Energy Department Inspector General's report in June 2013 said.

But a Sandia laboratory contracting official told investigators in an interview on Jan. 29, 2013, that when Sandia requested that Wilson fill out a time record, “Ms. Wilson refused to do it.” An official at Los Alamos similarly told the investigators that “Ms. Wilson was very direct with him, stating that she was not going to account for her time in any detail.”

“He said…Ms. Wilson stated…she does not need to do that for Sandia and she was not going to do it for them,” according to the investigator’s notes. Wilson also asserted “the $10,000 a month fee was not negotiable. That…was her fee to government clients, and her regular fee to commercial accounts was much higher,” said the official, whose name was redacted from the documents.

Asked this month in emails for comment about this account, Wilson did not respond. She also did not respond to phone calls.

A contract arranged at the top

According to the investigators’ notes, Wilson wasn’t pressed further by the labs to detail her work because her contract had been blessed by the labs’ top officials. At the time, Los Alamos was reeling from a $300 million budget cut handed down by the Congress that Wilson had just left, a contracting official told investigators during an interview on Oct. 11, 2012. Los Alamos' managers also understood Wilson had consulting arrangements with intelligence agencies in Washington that they hoped would give the lab new work, according to the investigator’s notes.

 “The director wanted an agreement with Ms. Wilson,” another Los Alamos contract administrator told investigators on Oct. 22, 2012. He was referring to then-director Michael Anastasio, who left his position in June 2011. Several telephoned requests for Anastasio’s comment were not returned.

Similarly, a manager for the contractors that operate Sandia said during an interview on Nov. 15, 2012 that Sandia eyed Wilson immediately as a prospective consultant after she lost a Senate primary the summer before she left Congress. “Ms. Wilson had contacts with people at the highest levels of government” and would be a valuable asset to “assist with strategic planning” by the corporation’s top executives, who were the “end-users” of her services, the manager said.

Sandia also wanted her to set up a national speakers program, which she did. But the contracts with Wilson were done without competition, and “it appeared that there were a number of resources that could have provided these services at a lower cost to the government,” a contracting official at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), who was responsible for helping oversee Sandia’s work, told investigators during an interview on Jan. 29, 2013. A Los Alamos contracting official who called the deal “weak” similarly said “there were people readily available that could provide the same type of advice as Ms. Wilson.”

At Los Alamos, Wilson’s invoices were supposed to pass through three levels of inspection. However, the language of her work agreement prohibited one of the clerks assigned with that task from contacting Wilson directly. Another clerk tasked with ensuring that Wilson earned her paycheck told investigators she accepted “informal” descriptions of Wilson’s work over the phone. And a manager at Los Alamos responsible for administering Wilson’s contract admitted he had been “lax” by stopping his reviews of her invoices after the first two or three months.

In fact, the manager expressed surprise when he learned from investigators that Wilson’s work for Los Alamos had gone on for 19 months and cost the lab — and consequently the government — $190,000, without required documentation of the work that had been done.

When Wilson’s contracts crossed their desks, some NNSA officials immediately eyed them with suspicion, given how soon they came after she left Congress. One NNSA official working in the agency’s oversight office at Los Alamos shared his impression with investigators “that after Ms. Wilson lost the election she reached into the Treasury for a money grab,” according to a copy of the investigator’s interview notes. Another NNSA official “wondered if this agreement was a ‘soft landing’” for the ex-congresswoman, who had supported the labs’ funding during her congressional tenure.

No monthly tasks specified

The investigators found multiple signs of contract irregularities. A paragraph requiring that all work result in clear “deliverables” appeared in a draft of her work orders, but was removed from the versions she signed. No concrete month-to-month tasks were spelled out in the Los Alamos deal, because the lab's global and national security divisions refused to endorse any.

One of the NNSA auditors at Los Alamos who approved the wording of these contracts told investigators that “he felt he was pressured” into doing so by more senior officials there “pushing the contract,” and that he feared retaliation if he did not. The claim was not substantiated by the inspector general, however.

Ironically, Wilson's contracts explicitly stated that she “shall not engage in any activity specifically related to obtaining, retaining, or facilitating business or business opportunities for the respective National Laboratories” — evidently because those are non-reimbursable expenses.

“Despite these prohibitions, our examination of relevant documentation at both Sandia and Los Alamos tend to indicate such activities,” the investigators’ summary said. For example, “At Los Alamos… [Wilson’s firm] arranged meetings with and/or site visits by senior Federal officials who had the ability to impact both funding and future work at the Laboratory in the intelligence area.”

At the same time, Wilson “failed to produce any actual reports,” one of the lead investigators of the Sandia contract said.

In an email to the Center in 2015, Wilson denied she ever directly lobbied on behalf of Sandia. “And I did not contact any federal official – Congressional or Executive – to try to extend the Sandia contract,” Wilson wrote. However, she did not respond to questions about her work for Los Alamos or discuss the issue of drumming up new business for the labs under their existing contracts.

When Wilson announced her second run for the U.S. Senate in 2011, her work with Sandia and Los Alamos was terminated. However, Sandia kept a no-fee agreement with Ms. Wilson “in order for her to keep her clearance,” the same Sandia manager who said Wilson was hired for her high-level political connections told investigators. The arrangement gave Wilson access to classified government secrets for the duration of her candidacy in an election that she ultimately lost to Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee where Wilson faces confirmation.

Sandia spokesperson Heather Clark said Wilson’s clearance through the lab remained active until 2013, when it was transferred to the Department of Energy. Clark called Sandia’s no-fee contract for purposes of keeping Wilson’s clearance active “rare,” but said “Sandia was not seeking to gain any favors.”

“Sandia knows clearances take a long time to reinstate,” Clark said. “In the interest of government efficiency and cost savings for taxpayers, we used this no-fee contract so she could keep her clearance.”

Overseeing federal work by a former client

If confirmed as Air Force Secretary, Wilson would be responsible for negotiating contracts with and holding accountable some of the same contractors that employed her as a consultant. Sandia Corp., the wholly-owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin that operates Sandia National Laboratory, paid Wilson $226,378 between January 2009 and March 2011.

Wilson’s work for Sandia began Jan. 4, 2009, one day after she left Congress, where she spent 10 years representing a district including Albuquerque, New Mexico. Records from a separate 2014 probe by the inspector general’s office showed Wilson coached lab executives that they could extend their contract to run the lab by telling Washington decision-makers that “competition is not in the best interest of the government.” In August 2015 Sandia reached a settlement with the Justice Department over its use of federal funds to finance her work that called for its payment to the government of $4.7 million, but admitted no wrongdoing.

Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a consortium consisting of Bechtel, BWXT Government Group, URS (since acquired by AECOM) and the University of California that operates Los Alamos National Laboratory, paid Wilson $195,717.52 between August 2009 and February 2011. Wilson also received approximately $30,000 from the contractors that ran the Nevada National Security Site and Oak Ridge National Laboratory during that time.

Trump announced Wilson as his choice for Air Force secretary on Jan. 23. Wilson hasn’t submitted the required pre-confirmation financial disclosure to the Office of Government Ethics. Her confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee has not yet been scheduled.

Former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M. speaks with her campaign staffer, Tito Madrid, inside her campaign headquarters, Tuesday, June 5, 2012 in Albuquerque, N.M.Patrick Malonehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/patrick-maloneR. Jeffrey Smithhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/r-jeffrey-smithhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/02/28/20740/trump-pick-air-force-boss-frustrated-auditors-lucrative-murky-consulting-nuclear

Senate votes to kill Obama contractor rule

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The Senate voted Monday to kill an Obama administration rule aimed at curbing labor violations among government contractors. Two years in the making, the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule was targeted by Republican lawmakers 10 days after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The House voted to excise it on Feb. 2, and Trump can seal its fate with his signature.

Before the Senate vote – 49-48, along party lines – the White House issued a statement saying the rule “would bog down Federal procurement with unnecessary and burdensome processes that would result in delays, and decreased competition for Federal government contracts.”

Issued in August by the U.S. Department of Labor, the rule requires would-be contractors to disclose wage or safety violations during the previous three years.  The vehicle for its undoing by Congress was the rarely used Congressional Review Act, through which recently finalized regulations can be dismantled by simple majorities in the House and Senate. The act prohibits federal agencies from crafting similar rules unless authorized to do so by lawmakers.

Lafe Solomon, a retired Labor Department senior advisor who helped develop the regulation, said Congress’s discarding of it constitutes a loss for American workers. “Workplaces will be less safe and workers certainly run the risk of not getting paid fairly,” he said.

The rule stemmed from a 2014 executive order issued months after a reportby Senate Democrats revealed that almost 30 percent of the worst violators of wage and worker-safety laws from 2007 to 2012 had received  government contracts. Eighteen contractors were assessed fines that fell within the top 100 issued by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration during that period. Thirty-two were hit with back-wage assessments that were among the top 100 levied by the department’s Wage and Hour Division.

“Unfortunately, this report demonstrates that the officials responsible for determining if a prospective contractor is a responsible entity prior to awarding a contract lack access to information on labor violations and lack the tools to evaluate the severity or repeated nature of these types of violations,” wrote Democratic staff members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The findings echoed those of the Government Accountability Office in 1995 and 2010.  In 2016, the progressive think tank Demos estimated that employees of federal contractors lose $1.6 billion to $2.5 billion each year from minimum-wage violations alone.

Contractors employ about a quarter of the American workforce. According to the U.S. Treasury, the government spent about $471 billion on contracts last year.

Though contracting agencies already consider companies’ past performance – which may include compliance with labor laws – in weighing bids, that information isn’t easily accessible across the government.

The rule dictates that any company seeking a contract worth more than $500,000 disclose violations – including cases pending with the Labor Department or other federal agencies, going back three years – of 14 different labor laws. Those without any blemishes on their record would check a box saying so.

Another provision is paycheck transparency – employers would have to let workers know precisely what they’re owed, theoretically enabling them monitor their own paystubs for accuracy. Employees alleging workplace discrimination or sexual assault would have the right to seek redress in court rather than be forced into arbitration.

Popular with labor advocates, the regulation has drawn the ire of dozens of trade groups.

“A better, cheaper, and faster approach is for the government to fix problems with their existing processes and data to enforce contractors’ and subcontractors’ labor law compliance,” the Professional Services Council, which represents more than 400 contractors, said in a statement.

Associated Builders and Contractors, whose members receive more than half of all federal construction contracts worth more than $25 million, is also vehemently opposed. Along with the National Association of Security Companies, ABC sued to block the rule last fall. Days before its first phase would have kicked in – companies bidding on contracts worth more than $50 million would have had to start disclosing their violations over the previous year – a federal judge in Texas issued a temporary, nationwide injunction staying everything but the paycheck-transparency requirement.

The judge questioned the legality of making contractors report charges of misconduct that haven’t been adjudicated. The Labor Department is appealing.

The resolution to annul the rule in the House was introduced by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who chairs the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“Workers deserve strong protections, and employers who do business with the federal government must be held to a high standard. But this blacklisting rule doesn’t make sense,” Foxx said in a statement.   “Adding an unnecessary layer of red tape would only hurt workers and small businesses, increase costs for taxpayers, and threaten the resources our men and women in uniform rely on.”

Supporters of the rule say the extra layer of scrutiny would help level the playing field for companies that follow wage and safety laws. We don’t want to see somebody who’s a fly-by-night contractor who isn’t complying with a multitude of laws be able to win contracts because their prices come in so low,” said Karla Walter, a labor expert at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

“I think President Trump has signaled that he intends to be a champion of workers, and he has the opportunity to veto this measure,” Walter said. “If he’s concerned about the little guy, if he wants to push back against corporate lobbyists, then now is the time.”

Federal contract workers and their advocates rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., in December.Maryam Jameelhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/maryam-jameelElizabeth Hernandezhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/elizabeth-hernandezhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/07/20748/senate-votes-kill-obama-contractor-rule

Panama Papers probe wins a Scripps Howard award

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The Panama Papers investigation has this week received its fourth major American journalism prize, the William Brewster Styles Award for Business/Economics Reporting from the Scripps Howard Foundation.

The series, which illuminated offshore tax havens and shook up politicians around the world, was coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, at the time a project of the Center for Public Integrity. The two organizations have since separated. The Styles Award also recognized McClatchy newspapers and the Miami Herald, who were partners in the project.

Journalists from ICIJ, McClatchy, the Herald and more than 100 media partners worked collaboratively to investigate a trove of leaked documents from inside Mossack Fonseca, a law firm in Panama that sells offshore companies and other complex corporate structures.

The award judges noted that the project “exposed offshore hideaways tied to mega-banks, corporate bribery scandals, drug kingpins, arms traffickers and a network of people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin that shuffled as much as $2 billion around the world.”  Judges also noted that since the probe, “governments and corporations in 79 countries have opened at least 150 inquiries, audits or investigations.”

Along with the recognition comes prize money of $10,000. The Scripps Howard Awards celebrate excellence in journalism in a total of 17 categories, with prize money totaling $180,000. The Scripps Howard Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the E. W. Scripps Company. Other winners in this year’s contest included ProPublica, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Houston Chronicle, The Oregonian and the East Bay Times.

The Panama Papers series has previously been honored with an Editor & Publisher award, a Polk award and a Barlett & Steele award. 

The Center for Public Integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/center-public-integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/07/20750/panama-papers-probe-wins-scripps-howard-award

FEC earning congressional attention — for the wrong reasons

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The Federal Election Commission — an agency of clashing commissioners, seething staffers and key vacancies — may soon face congressmen who wonder: Why’s the agency a basket case?

Such a trip under Congress’ microscope could come in the form of a Committee on House Administration oversight hearing, something the FEC hasn’t endured since 2011, when super PACs were still novel and the now-seminal Citizens United v. FEC decision wasn’t yet two years old. A planned oversight hearing in 2014 never materialized.

“It’s time,” Committee on House Administration member Barry Loudermilk, a Republican congressman from Georgia, told the Center for Public Integrity. “We should take the opportunity and have a re-evaluation.”

An oversight hearing is “both urgent and necessary” and should be conducted “sooner rather than later,” said Jamie Fleet, a spokesman for Rep. Robert Brady, the committee’s ranking Democrat.

Committee on House Administration Chairman Gregg Harper, R-Mississippi, is open to bringing FEC leaders up to Capitol Hill, with spokeswoman Erin McCracken saying the committee will “continue to use appropriate mechanisms of oversight, which could include possible hearings.”

The Senate Committee on Rules and Administration also appears to have increased appetite for reviewing FEC affairs. Although this committee has this decade conducted FEC commissionerconfirmation hearings andhearingsaboutcampaignmoney, it has not specifically conducted an FEC oversight hearing since 2004, according to committee records.

“There are many campaign finance issues that need to be discussed and investigated by the Senate … hearings in the Rules Committee would help increase transparency and shed light on our campaign finance system, which is badly in need of reform,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, the committee’s ranking Democrat.

Torrie Matous, a spokeswoman Senate Committee on Rules and Administration Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, said Shelby is “committed to proper oversight of the FEC and has staff dedicated to those efforts.”

Plenty to talk about

If an oversight hearing occurs in one or both chambers, expect tension.

Lots.

The six-member FEC is down to five commissioners — Democrat Ann Ravel resigned March 1— and all the remaining members are serving even though their terms have expired.

Ravel said she was bedeviled by what she declared “scandalous federal inaction” and Republican-driven “dysfunction and deadlock.” Republican Commissioner Lee Goodman, for one, roundly rejected the accusations.

Ravel and Goodman both havepredicted more departures, and Goodman himself told The Hill he’ll leave this year.

If two more commissioners quit the agency without President Donald Trump immediately replacing them, expect the lack of a quorum on the commission to worsen the gridlock. In 2008, the last time the commission lost a quorum, much of the agency’s business ground to a halt.

A White House press official declined to comment on the record about the Federal Election Commission or the replacement of FEC commissioners.

Staff morale, meanwhile, ranks near the bottom of all federal agencies — a situation exacerbated of late by a senior FEC manager improperly obtaining and sharing employees’ supposedly confidential criticisms of their bosses.

And some key staff positions simply have no one occupying them, or do only on an “acting” basis. Most notable: the FEC, which is tasked with enforcing federal election laws, hasn’t managed to appoint a general counsel since mid-2013, in part because commissioners can’t agree on who to hire.

Other vacant senior FEC staff positions at the roughly 350-person agency include the budget director, accounting director and the deputy general counsel for law, FEC officials confirmed. The FEC’s longtime inspector general Lynne McFarland this month retired on short notice, and the agency has not yet named a replacement.

Senior staff positions filled with staffers working in an “acting” capacity include chief financial officer, deputy staff director, deputy chief information officer, assistant general counsel for enforcement and assistant general counsel for policy. Often, staffers working in “acting” capacities cause vacancies in lower-level FEC positions.

Aside from general counsel and inspector general — positions mandated by federal law — the FEC is not actively filling jobs because of a federal hiring freeze Trump implemented in January.

Substance ... or theater?

At a congressional oversight hearing, the prospect of “political theater” is high, said former FEC Acting General Counsel Daniel Petalas, added that “there would be a lot of work needed by the FEC to get up to speed on all the talking points required.”

Much work may come later, too. After the Committee on House Administration’s contentious 2011 FEC oversight hearing, FEC officials released — under threat of subpoena — hundreds of pages of previously secret documents, including its manuals for enforcing campaign finance laws and auditing political committees.

Among the topics Petalas expects might arise at a new oversight hearing beyond vacancies and morale: agency enforcement guidelines, regulating the so-called “dark money” spent by politically active nonprofits and commissioners regularly deadlocking on high-profile legal matters.

Added Petalas, who left the agency last year to work as an attorney at law firm Garvey Schubert Barer: “Nobody at the FEC really wants to have to deal with that.”

But if he must, FEC Chairman Steven Walther is prepared.

Walther, who says no member of Congress has yet contacted him this year, would prefer if committee members would first address their concerns with him informally.

Beyond that, "I'm willing to meet with them any time on any topic," said Walther, an independent who often (but not always) votes with his Democratic colleagues on the FEC.

FEC Vice Chairwoman Caroline Hunter, a Republican, concurred: “If Congress wants to hear from us, we’ll do whatever it takes to prepare, and we’ll be happy to answer their questions.”

Walther might, however, have a few questions of his own for Congress, which has all but ignored an annual legislative wish list the FEC’s commissioners send members.

Walther says he’s particularly interested in senators justifying their failure to file their campaign finance reports electronically, a move that’s estimated to save taxpayers about $500,000 yearly. Unlike presidential and House candidates, Senate candidates continue filing their official reports on paper.

Congressional oversight hearings on the FEC would also be “an opportunity for the agency to state, for the record, the positive things it’s doing,” said former FEC Chairman Scott Thomas, a Democrat who today is a partner at law firm Blank Rome LLP. Thomas quickly noted that members of Congress will nevertheless want to know “what the heck is going on there in terms of hiring up and low staff morale.”

High points for the agency include a long-awaited, soon-to-be-completed websiteredesign and the move to a new, more efficient agency headquarters.

A hearing is also an opportunity for Congress to reassert its oversight of the FEC — something that in recent years has been “very uneven,” said Michael Toner, a former Republican chairman of the FEC and current partner at law firm Wiley Rein LLP.

“It keeps you on your toes and makes you a better commissioner when you have public accountability,” Toner said.

Given the FEC’s troubles, why has Congress not conducted an FEC oversight hearing since early this decade?

“It’s their job to look at us in Congress,” Loudermilk said, “so you sometimes don’t have a lot of us wanting to go after them.”

Versions of this article appear on NBC News and Public Radio International and in the Buffalo News.

Headquarters of the Federal Election Commission in Washington, D.C.Dave Levinthalhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/dave-levinthalhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/13/20751/fec-earning-congressional-attention-wrong-reasons

Documents: Office of Government Ethics, Trump team reached détente

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After a monumentally messy start to their relationship, Donald Trump’s incoming presidential administration has reached a détente — more or less — with an independent government agency in charge of preventing executive branch conflicts of interest.

In the weeks leading up to inauguration, White House Counsel Don McGahn — then leading the legal efforts of Trump’s presidential transition team — met several times prior with officials from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, according to emails and calendar entries obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The meetings began only after ethics office director Walter Shaub Jr. in November warned McGahn of imminent danger to Trump and his cabinet nominees, writing: “I am not sure whether you are aware that announcing the cabinet without first coordinating with OGE is unprecedented and creates unnecessary risk for both the President-elect and the prospective nominees … [M]y goal here is to protect the President-elect, the prospective nominees and the executive branch ethics program by preventing real and apparent ethics issues.

Then-President Barack Obama nominated Shaub in 2012, and the U.S. Senate, after a confirmation hearing, confirmed him on a voice vote in January 2013. Shaub, a veteran private sector and government lawyer who contributed$500 to Obama’s re-election campaign, is in the final year of a five-year term.

The Trump transition-Office of Government Ethics meetings — mostly by phone — took place in December and January and were scheduled for “every Monday and Thursday for 45 minutes” during the presidential transition period, an email from Matthew Marinec, confidential assistant to Shaub, indicates.

Office of Government Ethics officials confirmed that four meetings with McGahn ultimately materialized, including one in person. In addition to McGahn, a former Federal Election Commission chairman who is now Trump’s top lawyer, Jones Day attorney Ann Donaldson took part. Jones Day, a private law firm where McGahn was a partner before going to the White House, provided Trump with legal counsel during his campaign.

In a statement, the White House described the meetings as “routine.”

The Office of Government Ethics and Trump, whose high-level political nominees often face significant ethics and financial divestment challenges, at first had no contact at all, routine or otherwise.

After Trump won the White House, Trump’s transition team all but ignored the Office of Government Ethics’ attempts at communication. Shaub at one point lamented that his office had “lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition” and that reaching McGahn was “proving to be difficult.”

Then the ethics office — a small, independent agency charged with preventing conflicts of interest in the executive branch — went Twitter-ballistic in a decidedly Trumpian fashion. Armed with interjections and exclamation points, the typically straitlaced @OfficeGovEthics account mock-praised the incoming president for divesting his business empire — something Trump didn’t actually do.

Had hackers commandeered the Office of Government Ethics’ accounts?

No. The tweets proved authentic, ordered up in late November by Shaub himself in hopes of steering Trump toward divestment.

The Office of Government Ethics meetings with the Trump transition team began soon after.

Throughout the presidential transition period, Shaub remained skeptical of Trump’s commitment to avoiding conflicts of interest. On Jan. 11, Shaub  called the president’s plans to step back from — but not divest of — his sprawling business empire a “meaningless” act “from a conflict of interest perspective.”

The next day, U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican,  sent Shaub a letter informing him that his agency was under review, citing its November tweets. “Your agency’s mission is to provide clear ethics guidance, not engage in public relations,” Chaffetz wrote. Shaub met with Chaffetz's committee on Jan. 23 in what Shaub described as a “candid” and “extremely useful” gathering.

Officials at both the Office of Government Ethics and White House confirmed to the Center for Public Integrity that they’ve remained in regular contact since Trump’s inauguration.

But some of those exchanges haven’t been friendly.

In a March 9 letter to Trump’s Deputy Counsel Stefan Passantino, Shaub wrote that he remains concerned about White House Special Counsel Kellyanne Conway’s “misuse of position” stemming from Conway asking people to buy merchandise made by Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. The White House had earlier declined to discipline Conway.

Shaub also rejected what he says is a White House assertion that “White House employees are outside OGE’s purview.”

Tweets from the Office of Government Ethics's Twitter account.Dave Levinthalhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/dave-levinthalhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/16/20753/documents-office-government-ethics-trump-team-reached-d-tente

Trump budget: an extra billion dollars for nuclear weapons

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President Donald Trump has proposed to boost federal spending on the production of nuclear weapons by more than $1 billion in 2018 while slashing or eliminating spending on many federal programs related to diplomacy, foreign aid, and social needs, in a budget proposal that reflects the first tangible expression of his defense priorities.

The $1.4 billion budget increase for the National Nuclear Security Administration amounts to just a small fraction of the overall $54 billion boost he requested over the military’s roughly $639 billion 2017 budget, but it is a proportionally higher increase (11 percent) than the Defense Department itself would get (8 percent), signaling that he and his advisers feel the U.S. nuclear weapons program deserves special treatment.

The 64-page budget document released by the White House on March 16 — and entitled “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again” — contained only a few sentences about the proposal, which would give the NNSA a total of $14.3 billion in fiscal year 2018. But the blueprint said the new spending would support “the goals of moving toward a responsive nuclear infrastructure and advancing the existing program of record for warhead life extension programs.”

That language refers to an existing effort to modernize three types of warheads, so they can be deployed with bombers, submarine-launched missiles, and land-based missiles, some of which will themselves be modernized in years to come. That warhead work is well under way, although the budget document suggested it had been slowed by Obama-era defense spending caps. Some independent experts have cautioned, however, that the speed of the work is limited mostly by its sheer complexity, rather than by fund shortages, and expressed doubt that it could be accelerated.

Trump’s budget proposal also says the additional NNSA funds would address its “critical infrastructure maintenance” needs — which is Washington-speak for everything from laboratories and test tracks to office buildings — which NNSA director Frank Klotz has pegged in public statements at roughly $3.7 billion. That tally includes both nuclear weapons-related work and nonnuclear work related to the cleanup of wastes from past weapons production activities.

Much of the agency’s infrastructure is “antiquated,” having been built during the Cold War, Klotz told a well-timed hearing before the House Armed Services Committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee just a few hours after the proposed budget was released. “NNSA is presently busier than we have been for many, many years” but “operations are subject to increasing risk” due to spending shortfalls.

When Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) asked Klotz to provide more detail about how the new funds would be expended, however, he declined to answer. In a written statement, the Department of Energy — of which the NNSA is a part — said the current proposal represents only an overview, and that further details will be divulged in May.

Many in Washington say that Congress is unlikely to approve Trump’s budget. Nonetheless, the special status Trump has assigned to nuclear weapons work is exemplified by the fact that even as the NNSA’s budget would expand under his proposal, the rest of the Energy Department’s budget would decline by around 20 percent, or $1.7 billion.

Gone would be the department’s weatherization, gas mileage, and clean energy programs. The Office of Science, which supports research into new technologies and basic physics as well as climate change, would be cut by nearly twenty percent. Elsewhere in the government, the State Department would get a 28 percent budget cut, funds for U.N. peacekeeping would be scaled back, humanitarian aid would be focused on fewer nations, and all federal spending for the U.S. Institute of Peace would disappear.

The current U.S. nuclear weapons modernization program, which was initiated and strongly supported by former President Barack Obama, was already estimated to cost $1 trillion or more over the next three decades. But Trump, in a Dec. 22 tweet, said “the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability” — implying that this should be beyond what Obama had set in motion.

As if to hammer that point home, Trump on March 16 also announced the appointment as principal deputy Pentagon policy chief of a defense analyst who helped write a new U.S. nuclear policy in 2001 that supported research on new types of nuclear warheads. The policy, overseen in part by Trump nominee David J. Trachtenberg, a former Pentagon deputy assistant secretary under President George W. Bush, also downplayed the significance of arms control, and supported an expansion of U.S. ballistic missile defense programs.

In Feb. 2013, Trachtenberg joined other conservative analysts in sending a letter to Obama that urged the president to withdraw his public pledge to pursue the global elimination of nuclear weapons. This agenda, the letter said, would “only result in the unilateral disarmament of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.” It also urged Obama not to endorse further cuts in America’s nuclear arsenal, arguing that such a move would “put our country, its allies, and our peoples at ever-greater risk.” Trachtenberg separately has criticized Obama’s nuclear policy for ruling out “new nuclear weapons, missions or capabilities.”

Trump’s budget document says his choices demonstrate “the Administration’s strong support for the United States’ nuclear security enterprise and [it] ensures that we have a nuclear force that is second to none.”

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an advocacy group based in Washington, said the budget choices Trump has made will send “a signal that will worry our erstwhile adversaries, Russia, China.” But it will also puzzle our allies, Kimball said, because “they recognize American diplomacy is critical to their security.”

A portion of President Donald Trump's first proposed budget, focusing on the Department of Energy, and released by the Office of Management and Budget, is photographed in Washington, Wednesday, March 15, 2017.Patrick Malonehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/patrick-maloneR. Jeffrey Smithhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/r-jeffrey-smithhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/17/20761/trump-budget-extra-billion-dollars-nuclear-weapons

Powerful South Carolina political consultant implicated in indictments of a veteran state senator

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March 17, 2017: This story has been updated.

A powerful South Carolina political consultant featured in a Center for Public Integrity/Post and Courier investigation is implicated in indictments accusing a state senator of pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations for his personal use.

Sen. John Courson of Columbia is charged with three counts: two for misconduct in office and one for converting campaign cash for personal expenses. A bond hearing date has not been set.

Courson, 72, is accused of funneling nearly $250,000 from his campaign war chest through the political consulting firm of First Impressions, doing business as Richard Quinn and Associates, according to the indictments. The Quinn company then shifted about $133,000 of that money back to Courson through multiple transactions, the charging documents allege. 

Courson’s indictment came a little more than a week after the Republican was first contacted by State Law Enforcement Division investigators who said they wanted to chat with him about his political consultant Richard Quinn, a key figure in the probe.

Courson retained an attorney, who was informed over the weekend that the senator was now the subject of an investigation, according to sources with knowledge of the case.

Courson's lawyer, former assistant U.S. Attorney Rose Mary Parham of Florence, issued a statement Friday morning blasting the charges as a "partisan witch hunt"  by a "politically motivated prosecutor." She said Courson is ready for a jury to hear the case immediately "to put an end to these ridiculous charges once and for all."

"Everyone knows Senator Courson is a man of unquestionable integrity who would never use his public office for personal gain in any way," she said.

Courson’s indictment is the latest in an ongoing corruption probe by special prosecutor 1st Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe. Pascoe noted in a press release that Courson is presumed innocent until proven guilty, but otherwise had no comment on the indictments, citing the ongoing investigating. 

Since 2009, Courson’s campaign spent more than $500,000 on his state Senate races, according to a database compiled by The Post and Courier and the Center for Public Integrity. Of that sum, about $445,000 went to Richard Quinn and Associates for mailers, postage and “TV production, airtime, consulting,” according to an analysis of his campaign disclosure forms.

Quinn and his son Rick, a Republican representative from Lexington, have been key players in South Carolina politics for decades, often playing kingmaker for some of the state’s most prominent elected officials. In 1978, Richard Quinn founded Richard Quinn & Associates, a political consulting company.

On the national level, the elder Quinn worked for such candidates as Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, Lindsey Graham and John McCain. On the state level, his clients included now-Gov. Henry McMaster, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson and former state Sen. Glenn McConnell. They’ve managed hundreds of state and local campaigns, and the firm’s influence was such that some Columbia observers have called Quinn and his candidates, “the Quinndom.”

The father and son team were named in a 2013 State Law Enforcement Division investigative report that led to a guilty plea by then-House Speaker Bobby Harrell for misusing campaign cash. But no charges have been filed against them, and they have maintained they have done nothing wrong in their Statehouse dealings.

The Quinns also were featured in "Capitol Gains,” the 2015 series produced by The Post and Courier and The Center for Public Integrity. That series explored how South Carolina’s loophole-ridden campaign finance system and ethics laws allow state lawmakers to use campaign war chests like personal ATM machines and profit from government connections.

The Post and Courier reported this week that Statehouse probe investigators have obtained a copy of an audit that alleges the Quinns helped orchestrate Henry McMaster’s 2000 re-election as S.C. GOP party chairman by funneling money from their political firms into the party’s empty bank account. McMaster, a longtime client of Richard Quinn, became governor in January after Nikki Haley resigned to become United Nations ambassador.

(Update, March 17, 2017, 1:23 p.m.: When reached by phone Friday afternoon, Richard Quinn declined to speak specifically about Courson’s indictment — or the report of his firm’s inclusion in a 2004 audit of the SC Republican Party.

“All I can say is that the allegations are false,” he said. “Beyond that I don’t have any other comment right now.”

His son did not return calls seeking comment.)

Courson, a fellow Quinn client, has a long history in South Carolina Republican politics going back to the days when Strom Thurmond was one of the state’s two U.S. senators in Washington. He was elected to the state Senate in 1985 and served as Senate President Pro Tempore from 2012 to 2014. He currently serves as chairman of the Senate Education Committee. He represents parts of Richland and Lexington counties and is one of the Senate’s senior members.

Courson’s indictment came as a surprise to many who considered the 32-year senator a genteel politician with a sterling reputation. He received a career award from government watchdog Common Cause in 2013 for his work on ethics reform legislation.

Courson often chats about baseball and history. He is proud of being among South Carolina’s Republican pioneers who eventually would lead to the party’s control of the Statehouse and state congressional delegation, showing off mementos from Republican national conventions dating back to 1976 that decorate his Statehouse office walls. Courson, who is senior vice president at the Keenan & Suggs insurance firm, prides himself as something of a gentleman in the sometimes rough-and-tumble world of South Carolina Statehouse politics.

In 2014, he didn’t challenge powerful Republican Sen. Hugh Leatherman, who rose to take Courson’s job as senate leader — a move that another senator called a “hit.” Courson did not want an ugly fight among senators who could not refuse Leatherman because he had control over the state budget.

Ironically, Leatherman and Courson share the same political consultant — Quinn.

The move against Courson marks the third set of indictments handed down in the ongoing investigation and also puts the Quinns firmly in the crosshairs of Pascoe’s probe.

The probe has been going on for several years. In 2014, former House Speaker Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, pleaded guilty to improperly using campaign money to reimburse himself for personal expenses, including trips he took in his private plane. As part of his plea agreement, Harrell agreed to cooperate in any investigation of the Statehouse.

In December, Rep. Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island, was indicted on 30 charges of ethics and misconduct violations, that Pascoe alleges show a pattern that Merrill accepted or solicited more then $1 million from groups with Statehouse legislation at stake during his 15-year career in Columbia.

Post and Courier reporters Tony Bartelme and Maya Prabhu contributed to this report. 

A version of this story was published in The Post and Courier.

Glenn Smithhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/glenn-smithAndy Shainhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/andy-shainhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/17/20762/powerful-south-carolina-political-consultant-implicated-indictments-veteran-state

Five Center for Public Integrity projects garner awards in journalism contests

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Center for Public Integrity investigations involving the opioid crisis, state insurance commissioners, South Sudan, broadband access and offshore corporations have been honored in recent days by prestigious journalism competitions.

The Center was a winner in three categories of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers “Best in Business” competition, while taking a first place and a second place prize in the Association of Health Care Journalists’ awards for excellence.

“These wins showcased several deep-dive, investigative projects that covered a host of issues,” said John Dunbar, the Center’s chief executive officer. “The awards show it’s possible to write about complex topics in clear and compelling ways.”

In the business journalism contest, the Center was a winner in the international category for smaller publications for “Rape, murder, famine — and $2.1 million for K Street PR,” which detailed how Washington spinmeisters earned huge paychecks to help one of the world’s most murderous governments polish its image on Capitol Hill.

Judges noted that Erin Quinn’s story was enlivened “by featuring a former Sudanese ‘Lost Boy’ who called the fees received by K Street firms ‘blood money.’” The piece was edited by Gordon Witkin and John Dunbar.

The Center also won the technology category for smaller publications with “Rich people have access to high-speed Internet; many poor people still don’t.” The multimedia project showed that there is still a deep divide in America regarding access to high-speed Internet connections.

Judges commented that the “incredibly informative” package was “well-researched… enlightening and, at times, shocking.” The main story was written by Allan Holmes, with data reporting and visualizations by Ben Wieder and Chris Zubak-Skees. A companion video was produced by Eleanor Bell Fox. Gordon Witkin edited the package.  

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' “Panama Papers” project took top prize in the banking/finance category for large publications. Judges said the investigation represented “exceptional journalism on a topic of international importance.”

The business award marked the Panama Papers project’s fifth major American journalism prize. ICIJ was a project of the Center for Public Integrity when the series was written but has since separated.

The contest awarded prizes across 65 categories. Among other winners: Bloomberg News, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. Honorees will be celebrated on April 29 at the business editors and writers’ annual convention in Seattle.  
 

In the health journalism contest, a Center for Public Integrity collaboration with The Associated Press — The “Politics of Pain”— was awarded first place in the health policy category. The project investigated the politics behind the ongoing opioid epidemic with a unique look at how drug makers and their allies sought to thwart steps intended to combat opioid abuse.

Center for Public Integrity reporters Liz Essley Whyte and Ben Wieder worked with AP reporters Geoff Mulvihill and Matthew Perrone for 10 months to piece together the series, digging into campaign contributions, lobbying reports, internal company documents and government emails key to understanding the role that politics played in shaping the response to the crisis. The series was edited by AP’s Kristin Gazlay, Tom Verdin and the Center’s Kytja Weir.

Judges said the project was a “tour de force” and a “golden example of exhaustive reporting that was not exhaustive to read because the stories are well-told, edited and organized — and tragically important.”

Another Center for Public Integrity investigation, on the insurance industry’s ties to state regulators, was awarded second place in the business category.

The insurance project, “Drink, dinners, junkets and jobs: how the insurance industry courts state commissioners,” illustrated the “cozy relationships, revolving doors and shady financial connections” between regulators and industry, judges said. The piece was written by Michael J. Mishak, with data assistance by Ben Wieder, and edited by Kytja Weir. An abridged version was co-published in the Washington Post, the Hartford Courant and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The health care journalists’ awards recognize the best health reporting across 11 categories. Winners included the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe and Spectrum.

The prizes will be presented on April 22 in Orlando during the association’s annual conference.

Jennifer Weiss-Burke, executive director of a youth recovery center in Albuquerque, N.M., stands by one of the rooms at the recovery center named after her son, Cameron Weiss. He died of a heroin overdose in 2011. Weiss-Burke said her teenage son's descent into drug addiction started with an opioid prescription a doctor wrote for him for a wrestling injury.The Center for Public Integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/center-public-integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/21/20765/five-center-public-integrity-projects-garner-awards-journalism-contests

Center for Public Integrity staff featured on national TV, radio

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This month, Center for Public Integrity reporters and editors have been in high demand by television and radio networks who want their insight and expertise.

CEO John Dunbar spoke with "Full Measure" host Sharyl Attkisson about the Center for Public Integrity's fight with the federal government for public records.

Federal politics reporters Carrie Levine and Dave Levinthal offered their knowledge — about Donald Trump's money, Trump administration conflicts of interest, congressional action and lobbying — to C-SPAN and the CBC, among others.

And state politics reporter Mike Mishak detailed his recent investigation into Big Oil's grip on California to C-SPAN, as well.

Watch the interviews here:


 

Levine also appeared this month on "1A," the new National Public Radio program, to discuss how lobbyists are more than surviving during the early days of the Trump administration.

She also spoke with KALW-FM 91.7 in San Francisco about big-money politics in the age of Trump.

Levinthal, meanwhile, appeared on SiriusXM Radio's "Morning Briefing" program to detail his report on how Congress may increase its scrutiny of the flagging Federal Election Commission. He also spoke with WBEN-AM 930 in Buffalo about the latest Trump- and Supreme Court-related congressional hearings on Capitol Hill.

Center for Public Integrity CEO John DunbarThe Center for Public Integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/center-public-integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/22/20771/center-public-integrity-staff-featured-national-tv-radio

Wilbur Ross will shepherd Trump’s trade policy. Should he also own a shipping firm?

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When private equity billionaire Wilbur Ross Jr. signed on to be President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, he agreed to divest millions of dollars in assets.

But one asset Ross plans to keep is his stake in Diamond S Shipping Group Inc., one of the world’s largest owners and operators of medium-range tanker vessels, which crisscross the globe as crucial cogs in the transoceanic shipping trade. In a new administration full of successful businessmen dealing with a complex web of conflict-of-interest concerns, Ross’ part ownership of Diamond S Shipping stands out.

A Center for Public Integrity examination of Diamond S Shipping’s operations found its vessels sail under Chinese flags, even as Ross is being tapped to take an unusually muscular role shaping U.S. trade policy under President Trump’s "America First" mantra. The company has ties to a major Chinese investment fund, and one of its ships has traveled to an Iranian port.

Diamond S Shipping has also said it has — and may continue in the future to — “call on ports located in countries subject to sanctions and embargoes imposed by the U.S. government and countries identified … as state sponsors of terrorism, such as Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria,” according to its 2014 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

And one of Diamond S Shipping’s main customers recently acquired a stake in a Russian national oil company.

Ross has said he doesn’t believe the shipping investment presents a conflict. To take the Trump administration job, Ross agreed to step down from positions with the company, according to his ethics agreement, and plans to be a passive investor going forward.

Commerce Department spokesman James Rockas declined to answer specific Center for Public Integrity questions about Ross’ Diamond S Shipping investments, but emailed a statement that in part reads: “Commerce’s ethics officials provide the Secretary with ongoing guidance to avoid any potential conflicts of interest.”

Ethics lawyers offered a range of opinions on potential conflicts presented by Ross’ Diamond S Shipping investment.

Tom Fitton, president of conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, said the Diamond S Shipping stake represents but a tiny sliver of Ross’ assets, and the idea he would have to broadly recuse himself from his duties is “absurdity.”

But Richard W. Painter, who was a top ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, disagrees: “That shipping company is going to be a big problem with respect to him being involved with trade under the conflict of interest statute.”

Beginnings

Diamond S Shipping is based in Greenwich, Connecticut, but is incorporated offshore in the Marshall Islands. The company lists a total 45 tankers on its website.

In 2011, Ross’ private equity company, WL Ross, led a coalition of investors that put about $1 billion into Diamond S Shipping. According to the company’s 2014 SEC filing, his private equity firm at the time was the company’s largest shareholder, with nearly one-third of the company’s shares.

It is impossible to determine the exact value of Ross’ stake in the privately held Diamond S Shipping based on his government-mandated financial disclosures. But the total value of assets he said he is not divesting, which includes investments in transoceanic shipping and real estate financing interests, together falls between $12.2 million and $36.5 million, according to the disclosures, which value assets within a range.

Diamond S Shipping Group’s SEC filings detail the company’s ownership structure, which involves a series of subsidiaries.

Here’s how the business works:

The company cuts deals to allow customers, so-called charterers, to use specific vessels for specific lengths of time.

According to the 2014 SEC filing, 30 out of 33 product tankers in its fleet were signed to longer-term “time” charters, contracts that can lock in a rate for years.

In some cases, Diamond S Shipping negotiated profit-sharing deals allowing it to receive a pre-determined percentage of profits on especially lucrative voyages.

The SEC filing also said Diamond S Shipping vessels aren’t necessarily prohibited from calling in locales where sanctions and embargoes apply. In the filing, the company said it believed it was in compliance with all applicable sanctions, embargoes, laws and regulations.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, the company said its “charter agreements expressly require compliance with all applicable laws, specifically prohibit trading in violation of applicable U.S. or EU sanctions.” The company added that isn’t aware of any instances when its charterers have violated any applicable laws.

Strange bedfellows?

Diamond S Shipping, to be sure, does represent only a small part of Ross’ wealth.

Ross, 79, is sometimes known as the “king of bankruptcy” for his history of investing in ailing companies. And he stands out, even on Trump’s gold-leafed roster of wealthy Cabinet members, as a business titan at least as successful as Trump himself.

Although Ross agreed to divest the vast majority of his assets to take the job heading commerce, the financial disclosure he filed with federal regulators lists numerous opaque offshore entities that make it nearly impossible to independently ascertain all the underlying assets and all his business partners.

The Commerce Department traditionally plays a role in trade negotiations, handling trade enforcement and promoting U.S. exports, among a grab bag of other duties that includes administering the U.S. Census and conducting oceanic research.

As Trump’s Commerce secretary, Ross will have an even larger role in shaping U.S. trade policy than usual.

"Mr. Ross not only has negotiated some very good deals over his lifetime, he's also the person who worked closely with the president-elect on crafting his trade policy," Jason Miller, a Trump transition spokesman, said in December. "Mr. Ross will be playing a big role in any trade particulars in this administration."

In response to questions during his confirmation hearing about his role on trade policy, Ross said he expects to work collaboratively with the yet-to-be-confirmed U.S. trade representative, traditionally the administration’s lead person on trade, and Peter Navarro, the director of the National Trade Council. Together, they will work “to bring all the intellectual resources and experience that we can” to trade policy, Ross said.

Ross said renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement would be a priority.

But among all the investments Trump’s commerce secretary could hold, an interest in a transoceanic shipping company is perhaps the most incongruous given Trump’s decidedly protectionist trade agenda.

Trump regularly bashes a handful of foreign countries as enemies of America’s financial or national security interests.

In a 2015 book released during his presidential campaign, Trump wrote: “There are people who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy. But that’s exactly what they are.”

China, Trump continues, has cost the U.S. tens of thousands of jobs. Ross himself has called China “the most protectionist of the large countries” and signaled during his confirmation hearing that he would push China on free trade.

“We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs,” Trump declared in his inaugural speech.

Vessels belonging to Diamond S Shipping, meanwhile, do business in countries Trump has singled out, along with scores of other countries that will be affected by the U.S. trade policy Ross is shaping, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of maritime incident reports and an analysis of data provided by MarineTraffic, a global ship tracking intelligence provider.

For instance, the company’s vessels have made more than 100 visits to China since 2012, MarineTraffic data indicate.

Diamond S Shipping’s operations would also appear to conflict with another provision of Trump’s agenda, his “America First” mantra.

Of Diamond S Shipping’s 45 tankers, 32 are registered in Hong Kong. The rest are flagged in the Marshall Islands and Malta.

“The main reason for flagging in another country is that you then don’t have to pay people the rates that you would have to pay U.S. workers,” said Martin Davies, director of Tulane University Law School’s Maritime Law Center and an international expert in maritime law.

Sailing to Iran

Trump considers Iran a hotbed of terrorism and threat to Americans.

But MarineTraffic’s data and a Hong Kong maritime authority report show one of the tankers owned by Ross-backed Diamond S Shipping, the Alpine Maya, visited the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in early 2014, a time when the U.S. government’s sanctions against Iran were in full force. It was carrying soybean oil, according to the report.

Diamond S Shipping told the Center for Public Integrity the 2014 voyage by the Alpine Maya was legal.

Entities sanctioned by the United States include Tidewater Middle East Co., a company that managed several major Iranian ports, including, at that time, much of Bandar Abbas, though that has since changed. The U.S. government said it imposed the sanctions because of Tidewater’s relationship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which the U.S. government alleges is linked to weapons proliferation and Iran’s support for terrorism.

To be sure, Trump’s own organization once rented space in a Manhattan high-rise to Bank Melli, a state-controlled Iranian bank that the U.S. government says helped fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, as the Center for Public Integrity and International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported in October.

Sanctions are an extraordinarily complex area of both policy and law, and there have long been provisions providing legal routes for the export of certain kinds of products and goods to Iran, including many agricultural products.

But lawyers who specialize in dealing with U.S. sanctions said using the Bandar Abbas port in 2014 required extensive due diligence.

“Basically, I would say, if it was not prohibited it was certainly very high risk” because of the need to confirm there were no dealings with sanctioned parties, said Farhad Alavi, a lawyer who specializes in complex trade issues and works with the Akrivis Law Group.

“What you saw during the peak of the sanctions … a lot of shipping companies were backing out of Iran and the reason was, in part, because of this whole issue of the Revolutionary Guard potentially operating a lot of Iranian ports,” Alavi said. “More importantly I think it was the fear of getting near anything that was sanctions related.”

Erich Ferrari, another lawyer with a specialty in sanctions-related work, said that if someone asked for his advice about using the Bandar Abbas port in April 2014, “I would have said no, because at that time, it was known Tidewater was the port operator of Bandar Abbas. You can’t do it, or you have to show us Tidewater won’t be involved in any way shape or form in this transaction.”

Adam M. Smith, a Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner who previously worked for the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees sanctions, said many berths at Bandar Abbas were controlled by Tidewater.

“There are certain questions I would want answered before giving it the green light,” he said.

In response to the Center for Public Integrity’s questions about the Iran voyage, Diamond S Shipping said the customer that chartered the Alpine Maya at the time had a license from the U.S. Treasury “authorizing the export of the product to specific end-users in Iran.”

“At the time that Diamond S Shipping was made aware by the charterer that the voyage was to Iranian waters, Diamond S Shipping conducted diligence and conferred with counsel to confirm that the voyage complied with applicable laws. Diamond S Shipping also obtained express certifications from the charterer that the voyage complied with all applicable sanctions,” the company said in an emailed statement.

Connections to a Russia deal

Russia’s alleged influence on the Trump administration is being hotly debated on multiple fronts in Washington, and the FBI is looking into whether anyone associated with Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russian operatives.

Diamond S Shipping’s business relies heavily on a handful of customers, including Glencore PLC, whose deal to invest in Russian national oil company Rosneft has drawn scrutiny from American and European regulators.

In December 2016, Swiss-based commodities giant Glencore announced it would join with Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund to buy a 19.5 percent stake in Rosneft. The deal marked the biggest foreign investment in Russia since the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions in 2014 because of the country’s military occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

Glencore provided more than 10 percent of Diamond S Shipping’s revenue during the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2013, according to the company’s SEC filing.

The deal reportedly gives Glencore a new supply deal for Russian crude oil.

A Glencore spokesman, Charles Watenphul, referred the Center to Public Integrity to previous statements by the company saying its investment in Rosneft is in compliance with all applicable sanctions. Sanctions permit Rosneft to sell oil. Watenphul also noted that Glencore is one of the largest charterers of oil tankers in the world and works with many tanker owners and operators, not just Diamond S Shipping.

MarineTraffic data show the company’s vessels have made more than 30 visits to Russia since 2012.

"Rosneft is a sanctioned entity and therefore we have to look at how they're going to provide the financing," Amos Hochstein, U.S. special envoy for international energy affairs, said in December. Hochstein told Bloomberg any review of the deal would "be more about the financing side."

Asked if the deal violated the spirit of the sanctions, Hochstein said, "Clearly this is not what we were hoping for when we implemented sanctions."

The State Department did not respond on the record to a Center for Public Integrity question about the status of the review.

Holding on

Ross said during his commerce secretary confirmation hearing that he was keeping his Diamond S Shipping holdings, even as he won praise from lawmakers of both parties for agreeing to shed “hundreds of millions of dollars” in other assets and investments to avoid conflicts of interest.

Rockas, the Commerce Department spokesman, told the Center for Public Integrity that Ross has “resigned from all positions from which he agreed to resign.” Ross had been non-executive chairman of Diamond S Shipping's board, according to its SEC filing.

Ross testified before senators that keeping his stake in Diamond S Shipping doesn’t create a conflict.

“The research we've done suggests that there has never been a shipping case come before the Department of Commerce,” Ross said, adding, “We don't take any risk in the cargo. We simply are like a taxi cab: They put cargo, we discharge it in another location, and we're paid a fee for so doing.”

Ross said he would be “quite scrupulous” in recusing himself in any situation with even “the slightest scintilla of doubt.”

According to his ethics agreement, he “will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter in which I know that I have a financial interest directly and predictably affected by the matter, or in which I know that a person whose interests are imputed to me has a financial interest directly and predictably affected by the matter,” unless he receives a waiver or exemption allowing him to do so.

But such recusals do have limits, Ross indicated.

When Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., asked Ross to clarify whether he would recuse himself from a lengthy list of Commerce Department duties, including oil spill monitoring and risk management, Ross replied in writing that he “cannot undertake the broad and preemptive recusal that you propose.”

Instead, Ross said, he would recuse himself from any matter involving a vessel associated with Diamond S Shipping, and would “rely on the monitoring and judgment of the Department’s ethics officials to ensure that I do not participate in any matter about which they advise me that a conflict of interest would arise.”

Ross has not publicly addressed how he will handle issues involving major customers of Diamond S Shipping. One big Diamond S Shipping customer, Maersk, an international company based in Denmark, has lobbied the Commerce Department on maritime issues and port efficiency.

Ross has suggested international shipping issues won’t be completely out of his purview.

“Mexico has 44 treaties with other countries that make it very advantageous to do international shipping from Mexico rather than from the United States,” Ross said during an interview on CNBC in November, after Trump had indicated he would get the commerce secretary job. “Believe it or not, Mexico has better treaties with the rest of the world than the United States has. We’re going to fix that.”

Fitton, the Judicial Watch president, said “it’s to Mr. Ross’ credit that he took the job despite the hit he’d be taking personally and financially.”

Fitton said Ross should seek ethics advice and recuse himself “if there were a specific discussion of a shipping issue per se that had a direct and predictable outcome on his firm.”

But Painter, the former Bush administration ethics lawyer, said he believes Ross must recuse himself widely from Commerce Department business that potentially affects demand for Diamond S Shipping’s ships or influences the company’s finances, including broad trade negotiations.

The possible need for recusal is a shame, Painter said, because Ross understands the economy. “We need him to be involved in trade negotiations to bring some sense to this administration,” he said.

Norman Eisen, former chief ethics lawyer during the Barack Obama administration, called it a “challenging situation” because Ross’ shipping investment is “so closely related to critical issues in his official portfolio.”

For now, Ross is settling into his new job.

He was easily confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 72-27 on Feb. 27.

The next evening, Ross attended Trump’s speech to Congress. He strode in sporting a pair of $500 slippers.

On the customized footwear: the Commerce Department logo. It features a sailing ship.

Version of this story appear on NBC News and Public Radio International.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, center, listens to President Donald Trump during a meeting with House and Senate legislators in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on Feb. 2, 2017. At right is White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner.Carrie Levinehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/carrie-levineChris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/23/14509/wilbur-ross-will-shepherd-trump-s-trade-policy-should-he-also-own-shipping-firm

The public favors cutting defense spending, not adding billions more, new survey finds

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President Trump’s proposed budget for 2018 isn’t following public sentiment, a new survey finds.

The survey, by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation (PPC), found that while Trump has proposed a $54 billion boost to federal spending for the military, a majority of Americans prefer a cut of $41 billion. While Trump has proposed a $2.8 billion increase for homeland security, a majority of Americans favor a $2 billion cut.

Altogether, the survey looked at the 10 top areas of spending in Trump’s “Budget Blueprint” and found a gap of $139.6 billion between what the majority of the public would spend and what Trump has proposed.

Steven Kull, PPC’s director, said he was surprised both by the extent of the gap and the fact that Trump’s proposals were at odds with the preferences of both Republicans and Democrats. In general, those who identified themselves as Republicans were more likely to favor cutting some of the spending that Trump has proposed to cut, but on a raft of areas where Trump proposed large reductions, members of his party preferred to cut less.

On military spending, for example, where Trump’s proposal is $94.4 billion away from the majority’s position, a majority of GOP respondents said they wished to keep the so-called “base” or main defense budget at the current level, although they favored cutting $5 billion in spending from a budget for “overseas contingency operations,” specifically in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A majority of Democrats said they favored cutting $76 billion from the base military budget and $15 billion from spending in Afghanistan and Iraq — a $91 billion total cut for defense and a $144.4 billion gap with Trump’s budget. If enacted, Trump’s plan would boost military spending by a total of $54 billion.

The new study is consistent with previous poll results, suggesting that Americans’ budget preferences haven’t shifted that much, even after last year’s rancorous and divisive election. A survey released in March 2016 by Voice of the People, which is affiliated with the University of Maryland and sponsors PPC surveys, found a majority of respondents preferred taking the base defense budget down to about $497 billion from its 2015 level of about $509 billion.

Those results, in turn, were strikingly similar to the conclusions of a 2012 survey by the Center for Public Integrity, PPC, and the Stimson Center, a nonprofit policy study group in Washington, D.C. When respondents were asked in that survey what they would do with Obama’s base defense budget, the majority favored cutting it by at least $65 billion, from $562 billion down to $497 billion.

Asked for comment on the new survey results, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget did not immediately reply.

The survey by PPC sampled more than 1800 registered voters online. They were given a rough outline of the federal budget for 2017 and exposed to a short series of statements — which PPC said were vetted for fairness by opposing groups — about the pros and cons of raising or shrinking the deficit, enlarging or shrinking the size of government, and making public as opposed to private capital investments. Then they were offered the chance to change the budget, keeping in mind the total impact of the changes on the deficit.

The numbers it cited as majority preferences were the means of the preferred budget tallies chosen by the respondents, as long as the mean was supported by more than 50 percent. If fewer than that supported the mean, then the survey cited the next closest number supported by the majority.

Trump’s budget for 2018 would take base defense spending to $603 billion. But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, want to spend much more. They have jointly proposed a base defense budget of $640 billion -- an idea even more out of sync with the public than Trump's plan.

None of these figures include about $65 billion in additional military spending planned for “overseas contingency operations” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Trump’s budget also would add $1.4 billion in extra funds to produce and maintain America’s nuclear warheads. But a majority of all groups — Republicans, Democrats, and Independents — supported keeping that budget where it is now.

President Trump’s preferences are closer to public sentiments in a few areas besides defense and homeland security. For instance, for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, Trump seeks to cut $10.1 billion from the department’s core budget of $36 billion. A majority of the public would cut less — only $4 billion, although Democrats would cut zero and Republicans would cut the same amount as Trump.

At the Department of Homeland Security, Trump is looking for a 7 percent increase of $2.8 billion while a majority of the public overall and Democrats in particular would cut $2 billion. A majority of Republicans would keep the DHS budget the same as it is now. For Veterans Affairs, Trump wants a $7.9 billion budget increase, but Republicans, Democrats, and the public at large would prefer to keep the budget the same as it is now.

Significant gaps between Trump’s budget proposal and what the public prefers were also found in education, public housing, and medical research. Overall there was a $9 billion gap between Trump’s budget for the Education Department and what the public wants. Like Trump, Republicans would cut $9 billion while Democrats would hike education spending by $3 million. The public overall would not make any changes.

For public housing, Trump would cut $6.2 billion while the public overall and Democrats would not cut at all. Republican voters would cut $3 billion. Trump wants to slash spending on medical research by $5.8 billion. Republicans come close to agreeing with Trump, but the public overall and Democrats would keep the budget where it is.   

Copies of President Donald Trump's first budget are displayed at the Government Printing Office in Washington, Thursday, March, 16, 2017. The proposed budget for 2018 doesn't follow public sentiment, a new survey finds.Peter Caryhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/peter-caryhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/23/20778/public-favors-cutting-defense-spending-not-adding-billions-more-new-survey-finds

Center for Public Integrity awarded $3 million grant

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The Democracy Fund and First Look Media are today announcing a major infusion of new funding for the Center for Public Integrity, a $3 million general operating grant that will support the Center’s investigative journalism. 

“We are incredibly grateful to the Democracy Fund and First Look Media for this gift, it is a game-changer for us,” said Center CEO John Dunbar. “These funds will allow us to double down on our efforts to hold government accountable to the people, from the White House to the nation’s statehouses and governors’ mansions.”

The gift to the Center is part of more than $12 million dollars in new grants from the two groups “to support an independent, robust free press.” Among the other grantees are the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, which are also getting $3 million apiece, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, which is receiving $500,000.

The Democracy Fund is a bipartisan foundation established by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar “to help ensure that our political system can withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the American people.”  First Look Media, also launched by Omidyar, is a media company encompassing investigative journalism, feature films and documentaries.

“A healthy democracy cannot exist without a vibrant public square in which hard-hitting, independent media inform the public and hold power accountable,” said Democracy Fund president Joe Goldman. “Investigative journalists play a crucial role in our political system. We hope this support extends the reach and depth of a remarkable set of nonprofit newsrooms at a pivotal moment in American history.”  

The grant announcement continues a run of significant recognition for the Center’s work. In recent days, five separate Center investigations have been honored as part of three prestigious journalism competitions.

The Center was a winner in three categories of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers “Best in Business” competition, while taking a first place and a second place prize in the Association of Health Care Journalists’ awards for excellence and a first prize in the Overseas Press Club Awards.

In the business journalism contest, the Center was a winner in the international category for smaller publications for “Rape, murder, famine — and $2.1 million for K Street PR,” which detailed how Washington spinmeisters earned huge paychecks to help one of the world’s most murderous governments polish its image on Capitol Hill.

The Center also won the technology category for smaller publications with “Rich people have access to high-speed Internet; many poor people still don’t.” The multimedia project showed that there is still a deep divide in America regarding access to high-speed Internet connections.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' “Panama Papers” project took top prize in the banking/finance category for large publications. In the Overseas Press Club contest, the “Panama Papers” investigation won the The Malcolm Forbes Award for best international business news reporting in newspapers, news service or digital.

The press club award marked the Panama Papers project’s sixth major American journalism prize. ICIJ was a project of the Center for Public Integrity when the series was written but the two organizations have since separated.

In the health journalism contest, a Center for Public Integrity collaboration with The Associated Press — The “Politics of Pain” — was awarded first place in the health policy category. The project investigated the politics behind the ongoing opioid epidemic with a unique look at how drug makers and their allies sought to thwart steps intended to combat opioid abuse.

Another Center for Public Integrity investigation, on the insurance industry’s ties to state regulators, was awarded second place in the business category. The insurance project, “Drink, dinners, junkets and jobs: how the insurance industry courts state commissioners,” illustrated the cozy relationships, revolving doors and financial connections between regulators and industry.

To support the Center for Public Integrity and independent nonprofit investigative journalism, please visit www.publicintegrity.org

Insurance companies and their employees were among the top political donors to state commissioner candidates during the past decade in at least six of the 11 states that elect the regulators. The Center for Public Integrity found a pattern of coziness between the insurance industry and the state commissioners who regulate them, ranging from political donations to job offers. Here, a campaign worker puts up a poster for a 2014 insurance commissioner candidate in Los Angeles.The Center for Public Integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/center-public-integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/27/20780/center-public-integrity-awarded-3-million-grant

Justice Department joins suit alleging massive Medicare fraud by UnitedHealth

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This story is a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and the Center for Public Integrity

The Justice Department has joined a California whistleblower’s lawsuit that accuses insurance giant UnitedHealth Group of fraud in its popular Medicare Advantage health plans.

Justice officials filed legal papers to intervene in the suit, first brought by whistleblower James Swoben in 2009, on Friday in federal court in Los Angeles. On Monday, they sought a court order to combine Swoben’s case with that of another whistleblower.

Swoben has accused the insurer of “gaming” the Medicare Advantage payment system by “making patients look sicker than they are,” said his attorney, William K. Hanagami. Hanagami said the combined cases could prove to be among the “larger frauds” ever against Medicare, with damages that he speculates could top $1 billion.

UnitedHealth spokesman Matt Burns denied any wrongdoing by the company. “We are honored to serve millions of seniors through Medicare Advantage, proud of the access to quality health care we provided, and confident we complied with program rules,” he wrote in an email.

Matt Burns also said that “litigating against Medicare Advantage plans to create new rules through the courts will not fix widely acknowledged government policy shortcomings or help Medicare Advantage members and is wrong.”

Medicare Advantage is a popular alternative to traditional Medicare. The privately run health plans have enrolled more than 18 million elderly and people with disabilities — about a third of those eligible for Medicare — at a cost to taxpayers of more than $150 billion a year.

Although the plans generally enjoy strong support in Congress, they have been the target of at least a half-dozen whistleblower lawsuits alleging patterns of overbilling and fraud. In most of the prior cases, Justice Department officials have decided not to intervene, which often limits the financial recovery by the government and also by whistleblowers, who can be awarded a portion of recovered funds. A decision to intervene means that the Justice Department is taking over investigating the case, greatly raising the stakes.

“This is a very big development and sends a strong signal that the Trump administration is very serious when it comes to fighting fraud in the health care arena,” says Patrick Burns, associate director of Taxpayers Against Fraud in Washington, a nonprofit supported by whistleblowers and their lawyers. He says the “winners here are going to be American taxpayers.”

Patrick Burns also contends that the cases against UnitedHealth could potentially exceed $1 billion in damages, which would place them among the top two or three whistleblower-prompted cases on record.

“This is not one company engaged in episodic bad behavior, but a lucrative business plan that appears to be national in scope,” Patrick Burns says.

On Monday, the government said it wants to consolidate the Swoben case with another whistleblower action filed in 2011 by former UnitedHealth executive Benjamin Poehling and unsealed in March by a federal judge. Poehling also has alleged that the insurer generated hundreds of millions of dollars or more in overpayments.

When Congress created the current Medicare Advantage program in 2003, it expected to pay higher rates for sicker patients than for people in good health using a formula called a risk score.

But overspending tied to inflated risk scores has repeatedly been cited by government auditors, including the Government Accountability Office. A series of articles published in 2014 by the Center for Public Integrity found that these improper payments have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

“If the goal of fraud is to artificially increase risk scores and you do that wholesale, that results in some rather significant dollars,” Hanagami says.

David Lipschutz, senior policy attorney for the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit offering legal assistance and other resources for those eligible for Medicare, said his group is “deeply concerned by ongoing improper payments” to Medicare Advantage health plans.

These overpayments “undermine the finances of the overall Medicare program,” he said in an emailed statement. He said his group supports “more rigorous oversight” of payments made to the health plans.

The whistleblower cases against UnitedHealth center on allegations that the company submitted claims for underpayments to the government but did not report examples in which it had received too much money.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said in draft regulations issued in January 2014 it would begin requiring that Medicare Advantage plans report any improper payment — either too much or too little.

These reviews “cannot be designed only to identify diagnoses that would trigger additional payments,” the proposal stated.

But CMS backed off the regulation’s reporting requirements in the face of opposition from the insurance industry. The agency didn’t say why it did so.

The Justice Department said in an April 2016 amicus brief in the Swoben case that CMS’ decision not to move ahead with the reporting regulation “does not relieve defendants of the broad obligation to exercise due diligence in ensuring the accuracy” of claims submitted for payment.

The Justice Department concluded that the insurers “chose not to connect the dots,” even though they knew of both overpayments and underpayments. Instead, the insurers “acted in a deliberately ignorant or reckless manner in falsely certifying the accuracy, completeness and truthfulness of submitted data,” the 2016 brief states.

The Justice Department has said it also is investigating risk-score payments to other Medicare Advantage insurers, but has not said whether it plans to take action against any of them.

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

A portion of The UnitedHealth Group Inc.'s campus in Minnetonka, Minn.Fred Schultehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/fred-schultehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/28/20782/justice-department-joins-suit-alleging-massive-medicare-fraud-unitedhealth

Democratic senator investigates drugmakers' role in opioid epidemic

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A leading Democratic senator is investigating the nation’s top opioid manufacturers to determine whether they contributed to overuse of the painkillers at the center of a deadly addiction crisis that has led to nearly 200,000 overdose deaths in the past 15 years.

Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri on Tuesday asked the manufacturers of the nation’s five biggest selling prescription opioid products for internal information including marketing plans, sales records and contributions to third-party advocacy groups.

"We have an obligation to everyone devastated by this epidemic to find answers," McCaskill said in a prepared statement. "All of this didn't happen overnight. It happened one prescription and marketing program at a time."

The Senate investigation comes in the wake of multiple media reports on drug companies’ role in the ongoing addiction epidemic, including last year’s Politics of Pain series by The Center for Public Integrity and The Associated Press. 

McCaskill’s letters to Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Insys Therapeutics, Mylan and Depomed specifically ask for information about any payments the companies made to 17 third-party advocacy groups — including the Pain Care Forum, a little-known but powerful coalition of drug companies and nonprofit groups highlighted in the Politics of Pain series.

At least 13 of the other advocacy groups mentioned in her letters have belonged to that coalition organized by the chief lobbyist for OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, according to the Center for Public Integrity and AP’s review of its membership directories.

The AP/Center for Public Integrity series found that members of the Pain Care Forum met with some of the highest-ranking health officials in the federal government, while quietly working to influence proposed regulations on opioids and promote legislation and reports on the problem of untreated pain.

The drug companies and allied groups adopted a 50-state strategy to help kill or weaken measures aimed at stemming the tide of prescription opioids. The series found they spent more than $880 million nationwide on lobbying and campaign contributions from 2006 through 2015 — more than eight times what the influential gun lobby recorded for similar activities during that same period.

“This epidemic is the direct result of a calculated sales and marketing strategy major opioid manufacturers have allegedly pursued over the past 20 years to expand their market share and increase dependency on powerful — and often deadly — painkillers,” McCaskill wrote.

McCaskill is the ranking Democratic lawmaker on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The Republican chairman, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, did not sign the letters seeking the information from the drug manufacturers, but was sent copies of them.

Purdue did not respond to the Center for Public Integrity’s request for comment Tuesday. But Bob Josephson, a spokesman for Purdue, told USA Today that the company was reviewing McCaskill’s letter and planned to respond accordingly.

Spokespeople for Depomed and Janssen Pharmaceuticals told the Center they planned to respond, as well.

“We believe that we have acted appropriately, responsibly and in the best interests of patients regarding our opioid pain medications, which are FDA-approved and carry FDA-mandated warnings about the known risks of the medications on every product label,” said Jessica Castles Smith, a spokesperson for Janssen Pharmaceuticals.

Mylan's Nina Devlin said her company hopes the senator expands her interest to include the top 10 suppliers of opioid drugs to the U.S. market, noting that Mylan ranked as the 17th largest supplier of opioids sold in the U.S. in 2016 and represented approximately 1 percent of the domestic opioid market. "Despite being a small player in this area, we are committed to helping find solutions to the issue of opioid abuse and misuse,” she said.

Insys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The AP contributed.

Demonstrators march along Main Street in Abingdon, Va., on July 20, 2007, to raise awareness about the abuse of OxyContin. Since 2000, prescription opioid abuse has claimed the lives of 165,000 Americans, according to federal estimates.Kytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/28/20785/democratic-senator-investigates-drugmakers-role-opioid-epidemic

Ethics watchdogs: Why won't Trump’s pick for Air Force secretary account for her contractor work?

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Independent ethics watchdogs urged members of Congress this week to probe why President Trump’s Air Force secretary nominee, former Rep. Heather Wilson, was paid by nuclear weapon contractors to do consulting work for which she refused to provide a detailed accounting.

Wilson, a Republican who represented New Mexico in Congress from 1998 until 2009, faces potentially robust questioning on Thursday March 30 at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona. 

In separate letters to McCain and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the committee, the public-interest nonprofit Project on Government Oversight [POGO] and a consortium of three ethics organizations from across the political spectrum – the National Legal and Policy Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Public Citizen – encouraged the committee to question Wilson about her contracts with the weapons firms she’ll help oversee if confirmed.

Both letters cited a series of reports published in February by the Center for Public Integrity as a basis for their questions about Wilson’s nomination. The Center’s reports were based on federal records, many obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that detail internal Department of Energy concerns about Wilson’s refusal to report in writing to three nuclear weapons laboratories how she was spending her time in return for payments totaling $20,000 a month.

The documents obtained by the Center also detail Wilson’s role in helping a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin – the Sandia Corporation – try to win to win a new seven-year Energy Department contract worth more than $16 billion without the competition ordinarily called for by federal regulations. “Your message to these people is that competition is not in the best interest of the government,” she told Sandia officials in a July 2009 email.

Sandia Corp., the Lockheed Martin subsidiary in Albuquerque that operates Sandia National Laboratories, where nuclear weapons are engineered, wound up billing the federal government for the $226,378 in fees that it paid to Wilson. But after an investigation by the Justice Department, it agreed in August 2015 to repay what it spent on Wilson and also give the government $4.7 million to settle the department’s claims that it had violated federal law by using federal funds to lobby for more federal money.

Wilson hasn’t said much in public about her work. But in a 2015 email to the Center for Public Integrity, she denied contacting federal officials directly to lobby for Sandia. Three other nuclear weapon contractors – the firms operating the Nevada National Security Site, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory – repaid the government $216,499 they had paid Wilson, also without obtaining a detailed accounting of the actual work Wilson provided.

In interviews with investigators for the department’s inspector general’s office, employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration described Wilson’s work for the weapon contractors as a “money grab” and a “soft landing,” after she left Congress following an election defeat. She “failed to produce any actual reports,” one of the investigators noted.

In one of the letters to the Senate Armed Services Committee, POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian questioned whether Wilson could objectively oversee the massive amount of work Lockheed Martin does for the Air Force, considering her past work for the company’s subsidiary at Sandia. Lockheed holds more contracts than any other Air Force contractor.

Brian also urged leaders of the committee to seek assurances from Wilson that she’d be more forthcoming with oversight agencies as Air Force secretary than she was as a paid consultant, when she insisted on withholding details of her work from the entities paying for it at taxpayer expense.

“POGO believes Ms. Wilson should be questioned about her past employment and that the Committee should ensure she commits to an open and transparent relationship with oversight bodies,” Brian wrote. She suggested that the committee ask Wilson why she engaged in business development for Sandia when her contract explicitly forbade it, why she insisted on keeping secret what she was doing, and whether she was aware that government funds were the source of her paychecks.

“Why should taxpayers trust you with their money?” Brian said the lawmakers should ask. “Ms. Wilson should not be confirmed until she has adequately provided the answers to these questions and proven that she does not have a conflict of interest.”

The ethics consortium's letter drew a harder line.

“As leading organizations promoting ethics and accountability, we strongly urge you to vote against the nomination of Heather Wilson to be Secretary of the Air Force,” the letter said, citing “Wilson’s questionable actions on behalf of the largest contractor for the Air Force” as “a compelling case for not approving her nomination.”

When President Trump announced Wilson as his choice to head the Air Force on Jan. 23, he said, “Her distinguished military service, high level of knowledge, and success in so many different fields gives me great confidence that she will lead our nation’s Air Force with the greatest competence and integrity.”

Wilson graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1982, and then earned masters and doctoral degrees as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England. After serving with the Air Force in Europe, she became a member of President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff. After leaving Congress and eventually halting her consulting work, she became president of South Dakota School of Mines, which pays her an annual salary of $373,000.

In Aug. 2013, she also joined the board of directors of Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the U.S.; it’s currently in bankruptcy, but her financial disclosure said she’s been paid $200,333 for serving on its board. Wilson received roughly that amount annually, according to company shareholder reports. Since February 2016 she’s also been paid $46,000 for serving on the board of directors of Raven Industries, a South Dakota-based defense contractor that’s done $17.5 million in business with the Air Force, according to federal procurement records.

In a March 22 letter to the Office of Government Ethics, Wilson said she would resign from her college presidency and her seats on the boards of Peabody Energy and Raven Industries, and shed her stocks in those companies within 90 days. Wilson also pledged to divest stock she or her husband hold in 16 other contractors that work for the Department of Defense – including several of the Air Force’s most active contractors, such as Raytheon and Honeywell.

But she is not restricted from making decisions related to the Lockheed Martin Corporation, her former client, because that work didn’t occur in the past two years.

Former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., prepares for her election night speech with campaign staffer, Evan Dixon, inside her campaign headquarters, Tuesday, June 5, 2012 in Albuquerque, N.M.Patrick Malonehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/patrick-malonehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/29/20787/ethics-watchdogs-why-wont-trump-s-pick-air-force-secretary-account-her-contractor

Trump's Air Force nominee: no need to detail her work under nuclear lab consulting contracts

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President Trump’s Air Force Secretary nominee, Heather Wilson, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 30 that she had consulted honorably for four U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories years ago, even though she never produced a detailed written accounting of how she had spent her time while earning $20,000 a month. 

Wilson, a former Air Force pilot and House lawmaker who now runs the South Dakota School of Mines, was questioned closely about her work for the laboratories and her billing practices by two Democratic Senators on the committee, following the Center for Public Integrity’s disclosure that she had frustrated laboratory accountants by refusing to detail what she had done. 

Wilson, who had just left Congress in 2009, said she was working for the labs’ directors, that she had complied with the terms of her contracts, and that they were satisfied she had done a good job, suggesting that should be the end of the story.

But the questions arose because the Energy Department and the Justice Department in 2013 and 2014 concluded that the labs had improperly billed the government for her work, and forced them to return the federal funds they had been paid as a result. One laboratory, run by the Sandia Corporation, paid $4.7 million to settle a complaint that Wilson’s work was aimed at helping the labs win new federal contracts, a task that is not supposed to be paid for by federal dollars.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a former attorney general in his home state, asked a series of pointed questions about how Wilson’s approach might work at the Air Force, which spends more than $167 billion a year, much of it on contractors that bill the government for their labors.

Waving a copy of a bill she sent to one of the labs, which listed only the dollar amount she expected to be paid, the senator said “there is no way of knowing from this invoice what you did.”

“I’m asking you as a potential secretary of the Air Force whether you will hold contractors to a higher standard than is indicated by this document,” Blumenthal said. “Isn’t this a bad example — leadership is by example, the best leadership is by good example — of how billing and invoice submission should be conducted?” He also entered into the hearing’s written record invoices showing two occasions when Wilson had billed two separate nuclear weapon contractors for attending a single meeting.

Wilson replied, “Sir, the United States of America deserved my best work, and that’s what they got.” In government work, “we should expect contractors to comply with the contracts which they signed. In this case, I did.”

Drafts of Wilson’s contracts contained a standard clause requiring that she detail her tasks and accomplishments, but the clause was removed from the copy she signed, according to internal reports by investigators at the Energy Department’s Office of Inspector General.

The irregular arrangement, which contradicted federal acquisition guidelines for subcontractors, made contractor officials and Energy Department personnel uneasy, according to internal government documents obtained by the Center under the Freedom of Information Act. One of the contract officers said it was the only contract with such provisions that had ever crossed his desk.

When Wilson was asked by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island — a former Army captain, private attorney, and state lawmaker — whether she intentionally negotiated contract language with the weapon firms that exempted her from federal acquisition guidelines, Wilson said, “I don’t recall.” But she said she did recall discussing with their senior executives what she would be doing for the labs.

Part of Wilson’s work for Sandia, she said, was to help it navigate the Washington contracting thicket. “I was always available to them to answer the [lab] vice president and the president’s questions regarding the United States Congress and the federal bureaucracy,” Wilson said.

Wilson added that Sandia’s director had liked her consulting work enough to offer her a position as one of its vice presidents. She also said that if auditors at the Energy Department’s inspector general’s office had wanted to know more about exactly what she did, they could have asked her directly during their probe. But they never did, she said.

 Asked for comment, the inspector general’s spokesperson Felicia Jones said in a written statement that her office’s probe “involved allegations of misconduct by Sandia Corporation,” and that “It was Sandia’s responsibility to ensure only allowable and properly supported costs were charged to the Department of Energy. Consequently there was no need for the OIG to contact Ms. Wilson.”

Wilson also acknowledged during the hearing that as part of her consulting work, she had indeed told Sandia executives — who were seeking to extend their contract with the government — that “your message to these people [at the Department of Energy] is that competition is not in the best interest of the government.”

Asked by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the committee chairman, if she believes competition for contracts isn’t always in the government’s best interest, Wilson gave an answer that will cheer many existing Air Force contractors. On a select basis, she said, longstanding relationships between the government and its contractors on particular projects are better off if they are not disrupted by competitions.

Wilson said she would exercise that philosophy, in her future role, “when it’s in the best interest of the government.”

Wilson’s perspective clashes with the findings of a 345-page Government Accountability Office study published in March 2011. “The benefits of competition in acquiring goods and services from the private sector are well established…” the GAO report said. “Competitive contracts can save money, improve contractor performance and promote accountability for results.” 

Sandia and the other three labs that employed her — Los Alamos, the Nevada National Security Site and Oak Ridge National Laboratory — play a pivotal role in producing the nuclear weapons that the Air Force puts atop its ballistic missiles and inside its bombers. As such, if confirmed, Wilson will be responsible for helping to pay for and to oversee some of the work that the laboratories, her former clients, undertake.

In all, five Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee expressed support for Wilson’s nomination during her hearing. Nine more Republicans on the committee and all 13 Democrats have yet to say whether they support sending Wilson’s nomination to the full Senate with a favorable recommendation.

During the hearing, Republicans and Democrats alike on the committee implored her to follow through with Air Force commitments that would sustain economic drivers in their states or consider their states for fresh Air Force roles, such as bases for the new F-35 aircraft under contract with Lockheed Martin, which owns the Sandia Corp. Those moments made it clear that if confirmed, Wilson would have a hand in choosing winners and losers.

After the hearing ended, Wilson stopped briefly to talk with reporters on the way out. But when questions turned to her work for the labs and the investigations they’d spawned, she walked away.

The committee’s vote is expected next week.

Former United States Representative Heather A. Wilson (Republican of New Mexico) testifies before he US Senate Armed Services Committee on her nomination to be Secretary of the Air Force on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on Thursday, March 30, 2017.Patrick Malonehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/patrick-malonehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/30/20791/trumps-air-force-nominee-no-need-detail-her-work-under-nuclear-lab-consulting

James O'Keefe III: political committee created in his name is 'fraudulent'

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James O’Keefe III, a conservative activist known for using false identities to produce undercover videos targeting liberals, says someone is fraudulently using his name to create a political action committee.

On Thursday, a person filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to create “Project Veritas PAC.”

The PAC name echoes that of O’Keefe’s nonprofit organization: Project Veritas. The website and Mamaroneck, New York, mailing addresses listed in the Project Veritas PAC filing are those of O’Keefe’s nonprofit Project Veritas. And the PAC treasurer listed on the FEC document is “James O’Keefe,” who also purportedly signed it.

But O’Keefe said in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity that the FEC filing is a fraud: He denied setting up the PAC and he wants to know who did. O’Keefe said he first learned about the PAC filing when reporters contacted him to ask about it.

“Someone was trying to create a PAC in my name,” he said. “We did not create it. It is fraudulent.”

The email address listed on the form, purportedly for O’Keefe, uses the domain Yandex, a service provider based in Moscow, Russia. O’Keefe said the email address is not his, and the banking information included on the form is also unfamiliar.

Efforts to contact the creator of the PAC via the Yandex email address were unsuccessful.

O’Keefe’s biography describes him as a journalist “dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste and fraud.” Much of his work has been controversial. Project Veritas activists have used aliases and false identities in their stings. But some conservatives have hailed Project Veritas’ work as vital to holding liberals to account.

O’Keefe said Project Veritas’ lawyer, Benjamin Barr, is submitting complaints and requests for investigation to the Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the FEC.

O’Keefe provided the Center for Public Integrity with copies of the letters from Barr to the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission. The letters state the creators of the PAC “fraudulently misrepresented themselves to be James O’Keefe and Project Veritas” in “an effort to damage their reputation and goodwill through such fabrication.”

In 2010, O’Keefe and three others allegedly pretended to be telephone workers in an unsuccessful effort to gain access to the New Orleans offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat. O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor criminal charge of entering a federal office under false pretenses in connection with the incident.

O’Keefe first made national news in 2009 after he posed as a pimp and secretly recorded employees at liberal community service organization ACORN allegedly advising him on how to set up a prostitution ring. The video galvanized opposition to ACORN, and by 2010, the group had disbanded.

The FEC, meanwhile, has increasingly struggled to manage a flood of fake filings.

Last year, faced with increasing numbers of filings involving obviously fictitious figures, including Darth Vader, Katniss Everdeen and even God, the agency decided to act. It sent out stern letters asking filers to verify their information. For those that failed to do so, the agency said it would withdraw the filings. 

Anyone filing false information could face FEC fines or even criminal penalties, although the government has traditionally been reluctant to put resources into such cases.

A nonprofit group such as Project Veritas, which is organized as a charity under section 501(c)(3) of federal tax code, is also prohibited by law from sponsoring a federal PAC.

Judith Ingram, a spokeswoman for the FEC, said the agency can’t comment on any particular filing or committee “due to the potential of enforcement matters to come before the Commission.”

James O'Keefe, president of Project Veritas, waits to be introduced during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington on Sept. 1, 2015.Carrie Levinehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/carrie-levinehttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/03/31/20792/james-okeefe-iii-political-committee-created-his-name-fraudulent

Help the Center for Public Integrity win a Webby Award

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Great news for our investigative journalism: The Webby Awards today named the Center for Public Integrity a finalist for best political news blog or website in the nation.

The Webby Awards presents two honors in every category — a winner selected by judges and a winner selected by online voters. If you agree the Center for Public Integrity deserves honors for our political coverage, vote for us in the “People’s Voice” segment of the contest.

Cast your ballot by clicking here.

In the best political news blog or website category, the Center for Public Integrity is competing against PBS's "Campaign Connection," The Intercept, FactCheck.org and Code and Theory.

The Nation, the New Republic and the Washington Post's "The Fix" blog received honorable mentions.

All Webby Award winners will be announced on April 25.

Established in 1996, the Webby Awards honor excellence on the Internet and are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Today’s announcement marks the second time the Center for Public Integrity's political coverage has been nominated for a Webby Award— it was last nominated in 2014.

During Election 2016, the Center for Public Integrity's federal politics team published dozens of groundbreaking articles and investigations as part of its federal politics team's "Buying of the President" project.

"Who's Calling the Shots in State Politics," a project of the Center for Public Integrity's states politics team, routinely exposed the powerful special interests that drive elections and policy in statehouses from coast to coast.

The Center for Public Integrity, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, is nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative newsroom based in Washington, D.C.

Its mission: To serve democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of public trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.

The Center for Public Integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/center-public-integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/04/04/20798/help-center-public-integrity-win-webby-award

New database details White House officials' finances

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On Friday night, the White House began releasing financial disclosures for scores of key employees — including familiar names such as Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway and Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

Reporters from dozens of news organizations, including the Associated Press, the New York TimesProPublica and the Washington Post, then compiled and reported on the documents, which the White House released one-by-one.

The Center for Public Integrity compiled data from those disclosures into a searchable, sortable database, which provide a window into the wealth, assets and business interests of many of the people closest to President Donald Trump. The Center for Public Integrity’s news developer, Chris Zubak-Skees, extracted these details from more than 90 reports, released in PDF format, using a software tool he created.

You can search or download the database for yourself.

Within the disclosures are new details on Bannon’s web of financial ties to billionaire Republican megadonor Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah.

The Center for Public Integrity first published a graphic showing such ties in October, but Zubak-Skees has updated the graphic to show more connections.

 

 

From left: White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Trump; Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland and then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Feb. 9, 2017.The Center for Public Integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/center-public-integrityhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2017/04/04/20801/new-database-details-white-house-officials-finances
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