Abuse of Power

“As someone who has worked on these issues for decades, I have never seen such a public interest,” Karen Hobert Flynn, president of nonpartisan government watchdog Common Cause, told Newsweek. She credits ethics experts like Painter for contributing to that interest. “Having attorneys who specialize in this, that can explain what the law says and what the administration was doing, and could do it in ways that were accessible and understandable, I think people become hungry for it,” Hobert Flynn said. She added that her group has added 40,000 small donors since Trump took office and that fundraising is up 175 percent year over year.

“I have no doubt that Silver will put forward the same defense, which is that it’s business as usual in Albany and therefore not illegal,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York. “That’s why it’s so important that the first jury rejected this argument, and we expect that the second jury will do the same.”

As 2018 congressional races heat up, Common Cause is once again tracking the positions of every Member of Congress on issues vital to the health of our democracy. Members of the House and Senate have received letters asking them to co-sponsor and support more than a dozen democracy reform bills and informing them that their co-sponsorship record will be published to our 1.1 million members during the lead-up to Election Day in Common Cause’s “Democracy Scorecard.”

More than 300,000 people are ready to take to the streets for peaceful protests if President Trump fires Special Counsel Robert Mueller or acts to shut down his investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

American democracy is resilient. It has withstood attacks from enemies, foreign and domestic, for more than two centuries. But never has the United States been led by a president who has so flagrantly lied and so incessantly debased our democratic values and our institutions of self-government as President Donald J. Trump. This report sets forth 20 examples that demonstrate President Trump’s historic first year failure on issues of government integrity, transparency, and accountability.