As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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How to win contracts and influence Congress

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Somewhere in America a lobbyist, or maybe a contractor, is writing a book with that title. Lobbyists, freely seeking contracts with little or no restraint, appear to have perfected a system, with their clients, of winning contracts and gaining influence. TPM Muckraker -- posting about yesterday’s Vanity Fair expose on the seedy world of defense contracts (“a window into Babylon or the last stages of Rome”) -- explained the business model of companies seeking contracts in Washington: “First you get the congressman, then you get the earmarks, and then you get the money.”

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A New Kind of Politics

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Jimmy Wales --  the founder of Wikipedia -- has launched a new wiki called Campaigns Wikia --  a wiki that has the modest goal of inventing an era of participatory politics. If anyone can do it, I'd bet on Wales' to galvanize it.

Wales' rationale is sound even if the task is huge.

"Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics....

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A Further Communication from House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s Attorney

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I received the following email from Mr. J. Randall Evans, the attorney for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, on June 24. (The previous correspondence is, in chronological order, at the end of this post, then here and here. Sorry I didn't get around to posting it back then--I was busy getting ready to get out of town, and at the time didn't have and still don't have much of a response to it, other than to say that we continue to stand by our story:

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Back in the Office…

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...and ready to go. As I was reading through a week's worth of email, I came across this, the subject line of which made me mistakenly assume it was a solicitation for a campign contribution from a congressional campaign:

Does The Government Have 25K Waiting For You Too?
Turns out the email is from a company that offers software to help you find your own personal piece of federal largesse. The text tells us...
Thousands of people receive FREE MONEY from the US Government every month in the form of government grants. Imagine what you can do with $25,000, $50,000 or more!

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Announcing Online Poll

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Today, Sunlight is posting an online poll asking the public if Congress is doing enough to address ethics and lobbying reform in the wake of recent scandals. We've posted one serious question and another one with a touch of humor: do you think it more likely that there would be a live sighting of Elvis before the current congressional leadership showed real leadership on the need for reform? (The poll is viewable here, and bloggers are encouraged to copy the source code and post it on their own sites.)

Why the cynical question? Here's a brief guide to the issue.

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Small Business Shafted Again

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The New York Times today broke a story that I first learned about nearly two years ago – that the federal government’s annual accounting of federal contracts going to “small businesses” is routinely overstated, with much of that money actually going to large corporations.

I stumbled onto the story while analyzing six years of Pentagon contracts for the Center for Public Integrity. I’d been tipped off to the practice by a Defense Department analyst who’d been working with the contract data for years. He told me – and I subsequently documented it in the records – that under the contracting rules, if a small business is bought by a larger one, the contract is still counted as going to small business.

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What Next in Cunningham Investigation

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Vanity Fair reports on the ongoing Cunningham investigation and where it will go next. The article notes that Cunningham was seeking bribes days before he pled guilty; Brent Wilkes, the defense contractor at the center of the investigation, made connections in Washington by introducing congressmen to women in Honduras; Bill Lowery, the former congressman and current lobbyist embroiled in the scandal, introduced Cunningham to Wilkes. So who goes next in the investigation: Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, [sw: Katherine Harris] (R-Fla.), Wilkes, Lowery, or Rep. [sw: Virgil Goode] (R-Va.)?

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Daylight AM

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  • Conservative activist Grover Norquist called [sw: John McCain] (R-Ariz.) "delusional" for exposing Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) as a shadow lobbying operation and a conduit for Jack Abramoff's money laundering. (The Hill)
  • Congress put itself in a crunch this year when it decided to set a schedule that, in total, is shorter than a school year and may prove to be shorter than any meeting schedule in the past sixty years. They must now push through numerous important bills with only July and possibly September left. (Christian Science Monitor)
  • Democrats are upset with one of their main funding sources, labor unions, because they are contributing campaign funds to highly vulnerable Republicans. One labor lobbyist believes that "Democrats can’t expect unions to place all their bets on Democratic candidates and risk being shut out of the legislative process if they lose." (The Hill)
  • Clients continue to drop the lobbying firm Copeland Lowery because of its involvement in the growing investigation into Appropriations Chair [sw: Jerry Lewis] (R-Calif.). Riverside County, Boeing Co., and now the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority have all severed their ties to the embattled lobbying firm. (San Bernardino Sun)

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Seeking Independence

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Every year around the 4th of July an old, uncomfortable question always comes to mind for me: exactly how independent are our representatives in Washington?

For years I thought a good way to measure this would be to establish some kind of Independence Quotient (IQ) for members of Congress – a formula that would take into consideration all those elements that tend to divide, not reinforce, their responsibilities to their constituents.

Elements like the following:

What proportion of their campaign funds – the mother’s milk that every politician has to raise to keep their seat – comes from outside their home state?

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Daylight AM:

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  • Roll Call reports that the Justice Department subpoenaed the e-mails of Rep. [sw: William Jefferson] (D-La.) in the ongoing bribery investigation. Jefferson will have the chance to challenge the release of certain e-mails under the Speech and Debate Clause. The congressman could "be allowed to review them and decide whether he wants to try to assert his privilege under the Speech or Debate Clause and withhold them from the federal prosecutors. Jefferson would then have to file a legal motion in federal court in Alexandria outlining the reasons for why they should not be turned over to federal investigators."
  • The manager of MZM, Inc., Richard A. Berglund, was accused of violating FEC rules by illegally donating money to Rep. [sw: Virgil Goode] (R-Va.). MZM, Inc. was one of the chief defense contractors charged with bribing Rep. [sw: Duke Cunningham] and the owner, Mitchell Wade, has since pled guilty to the charges. In this case Berglund stands accused of ""aiding and abetting" a scheme by MZM's owner to donate the funds in the name of others."
  • The money paid to Julie Doolittle, the wife of Rep. [sw: John Doolittle] (R-Calif.), by Jack Abramoff to do fundraising for a charity event is receiving new scrutiny after the Senate Indian Affairs Committee report detailed the dates that she received the payments. Julie Doolittle "received the lion’s share of her monthly retainer fees long after a canceled charity event, which had been the principal reason cited for her $5,000-a-month retainer deal with the admitted felon’s ex-lobbying firm". Julie Doolittle received just $27,000 around the time of the charity event, but later received a seemingly unconnected $40,000 from Abramoff "three weeks after Rep. Doolittle, an avowed anti-gambling Mormon, wrote a letter of support for a tribal client of Abramoff’s seeking to reopen its casino."

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