One group has filed 12 lawsuits targeting either President Trump or the actions of his administration. Another organization has submitted 527 public-records requests sprinkled throughout the federal government. Yet another has collected 1.3 million signatures calling for President Trump’s impeachment.
The biggest risk to Trump’s presidency may be special counsel Robert Mueller’s high-profile investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, which has already led to criminal charges against two Trump campaign advisers and a guilty plea from a third.
But the president faces an aggressive cottage industry of watchdog groups that are closely tracking — and challenging — his every move. Brand new groups have launched this year, and others have expanded their missions, flush with donations from people eager to provide a check on Trump and his policies. Many have liberal leanings.
A picture speaking thirty-nine thousand words. #WednesdayWisdom pic.twitter.com/a30uPTZqH1
— U.S. OGE (@OfficeGovEthics) April 19, 2017
“If you look at the landscape of groups that are active right now, I think the Trump administration should be nervous, because I don’t see a lot of wiggle room for them,” said Austin Evers, a former Obama administration lawyer who runs one of the new groups, American Oversight.
“If they transgress, someone’s going to catch them,” he said.
American Oversight’s team of lawyers has used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to send more than 500 public-records requests to 30 government agencies. The group helped uncover examples of Ivanka Trump’s use of personal email to conduct government work and unearth the industry-heavy calendar of appointments kept by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
The groups pursuing Trump say they are trying to keep close tabs on a president who is bucking ethical norms by retaining ownership of his businesses and abruptly firing FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the agency’s probe into the Russian government involvement in last year’s election.
“We are in a crisis of ethics,” said Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington or CREW. “There are ethics and conflicts and influence problems in this administration unlike any we have ever seen. And it began with the president’s decision not to divest from his businesses.”
White House officials this week contended that Trump is operating ethically. As an example, they point to his signing of a far-reaching ethics policy that, among other things, tries to slow the revolving door between government and industry by imposing a five-year cooling-off period before former government appointees can work as lobbyists.
“An organized onslaught from partisan groups committed to undermining the President’s agenda can’t change the fact that he has elevated ethics within this administration,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said in a statement.
To be sure, Republican groups are not sitting on the sidelines.
One GOP-aligned organization, America Rising PAC, already has 20 full-time trackers following Democratic Senate candidates in key 2018 races, along with a slew of potential contenders for the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, said Alexandra Smith, the group’s executive director. A special focus will be highlighting any examples of ethical lapses among Democrats, she said.
But the organizations currently keeping a watchful eye on Trump during his first year in office are bombarding the administration from all sides.
Some examples:
• CREW, whose board members include former White House ethics lawyers and vocal Trump critics Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, has filed 12 lawsuits challenging Trump’s actions or those of his aides. One landed in the first week of his presidency, contending that Trump is violating a constitutional provision the bars him for receiving any economic benefits from foreign interests by continuing to derive profits from his businesses.
Trump and his lawyers have consistently rejected arguments that payments to his businesses violate the Constitution and say the lawsuit and others like it amount to partisan attacks.
Other CREW lawsuits seek visitor logs from the White House and Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago; details surrounding a March meeting between Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and the American Petroleum Institute’s board at Trump’s Washington hotel; and records about Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s use of a government plane in August to travel to Kentucky on a visit that included viewing the solar eclipse.
Mnuchin said denied using government resources to view the eclipse, saying the trip was to see Fort Knox.
Free Speech for People launched seven years ago in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United opening the door to unlimited money in candidate elections, but it has expanded its mission to focus on Trump, said president John Bonifaz.
It has joined with liberal RootsAction to call for a Trump impeachment investigation.
But it also had pushed big state pension systems to dump a real-estate fund that owns Trump SoHo because an arm of the Trump business empire managed the property.
On Wednesday, the Trump Organization announced it had reached a deal to end its management of the 46-story hotel-condominium in New York, which has struggled financially.
• Democracy Forward, founded this year, has filed 17 lawsuits, many of them focused on action at the agency level.
In one, Democracy Forward is representing a group of disabled veterans suing the U.S. Department of Transportation over the administration’s decision to delay until 2019 an Obama-era rule requiring airlines to report how often they damage or lose wheelchairs.
In another challenge to the administration, the group this month invoked a little-known federal data law to push back against what they claim are “unreliable and misleading” statements by top Trump aides selling the Republican tax plan as a boon for average Americans.
The 2000 Information Quality Act their lawyers cite requires that any information disseminated by federal officials be “accurate, reliable and unbiased.”
“We’re using every legal tool in the toolbox to hold the administration accountable,” Anne Harkavy, the group’s executive director and a former attorney in the Energy Department during the Obama administration.
Democracy Forward’s board members include John Podesta, the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and Marc Elias, a powerhouse Democratic election lawyer who served as the Clinton campaign’s top lawyer.
The groups operate as nonprofits, and some say their donations are soaring.
CREW receives about $20,000 in small donations over the course of a typical year, but took in about $120,000 over the weekend Trump was inaugurated, Bookbinder said. The group does not identify its donors, nor does American Oversight.
“We’re taking on some pretty powerful interests,” said American Oversight’s Evers. “I think some donors prefer not to become targets.”
The focus on ethics in the Trump era has made unlikely celebrities of some Washington ethic figures.
Walter Shaub, the Office of Government Ethics chief who emerged as Trump’s biggest taxpayer-funded ethics nag before resigning this summer, earned his own Facebook fan page — with more than 2,000 followers as public interest in Trump and ethics soared.
Between Oct. 1, 2016, and March 31 of this year, the public had contacted the Office of Government Ethics more than 39,000 times, through phone calls, email and other correspondence, according to agency data released during Shaub’s tenure.
By comparison, the little-known office had just 164 contacts from the public during similar window during the previous fiscal year.
Shaub left his post in July to become senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group legal advocacy group that also is pursuing ethics cases against the Trump administration.
In his 15 years with the Office of Government Ethics, “we were basically standing on the street corner, waving our arms and holding up signs, saying ‘Hey look over here: Ethics!’ And we couldn’t get anyone’s attention.”
“Now, people care,” he said.
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