Disclosure & Transparency

On Tuesday evening, Congressman Joaquin Castro shone a light on those funders in his hometown of San Antonio. That publicly-available information is crucial to running fair and transparent elections.

MSNBC starts a four-part series called American Swamp this Sunday. It will look at President Trump's finances, money in politics, how lobbyists influence legislation, and what we can do about it. The series feature some of our favorite people, including Shelia Krumholz at OpenSecrets.org, and students at North Carolina A&T talking about gerrymandering. Tune in.

Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for the good government group Common Cause, said lawmakers who provide the information helps promote transparency. "It's critically important for the public to have faith and confidence that their elected officials are doing the people's business, not the bidding of special interests," Scherb said.

Today, Common Cause is launching a new effort to ensure voters’ right to know where presidential candidates stand on practical solutions to the challenges facing our democracy. The Our Democracy 2020 campaign will focus getting every presidential candidate in the Democratic and Republican primaries to respond to a 17-question survey and inject the high priority conversation on the need for democracy reform in the presidential campaign. 

Ending a feud over funding between the city council and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta will introduce a new office to tackle corruption and bolster transparency for the city.

“The Special Counsel concluded that the promised ‘documents and information that would incriminate Hillary’ constituted a ‘thing of value,’” the complaint supplement from Common Cause, Campaign Legal Center, and Democracy 21 states. “And that Trump Jr.—and potentially Manafort and Kushner—solicited such a contribution from a person known to be a foreign national.”The supplement concludes: “In other words, the Special Counsel concluded that, at a minimum, Trump Jr. violated the ban on soliciting contributions from foreign nationals.”