Executive Ethics

Common Cause members will be joining Tax Marches from coast to coast on Saturday to demand that President Donald Trump release his taxes. Tens of thousands of Americans are expected to attend more than 100 marches taking place across the country to express their outrage that the President refuses to release his taxes after promising repeatedly on the campaign trail to make them public. Every U.S. President since the 1960s, including Richard Nixon, has released their tax returns and none has had conflicts anything like Trump’s with his business holdings all over the globe.

A report today suggests key members of President Trump’s family are more concerned with using their father’s new position to increase the family fortune than with serving the American public.

As news breaks about Trump campaign officials embroiled in the FBI Russian investigation, local Common Cause activists began nationwide delivery of petitions to Members of Congress, urging them to support the formation of an independent commission to investigate the Russian government’s attack on the 2016 election. The deliveries of constituent signatures come in the wake of media reports late yesterday revealing that Trump campaign advisor Carter Page was under investigation by the FBI last summer resulting in the granting of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant by a secret court. In visits to district offices from Florida to Alaska and from Maine to Arizona, activists are emphasizing that the partisan atmosphere in Washington is too charged currently for a full and fair investigation by members of Congress.

As progressive activists across the country, including many recruited by Common Cause, gear up for “Tax Day” marches on Saturday to pressure President Trump to release his federal income tax returns, a University of Chicago law professor is pushing a new strategy to force the president’s hand.

President Trump’s promise to put his far-flung business empire in a blind trust, the better to ensure that his personal financial interests could never conflict with his obligation to serve the public interest, turns out to have been fake news. Bigly.

The president is exempt from federal conflict of interest laws but his daughter and son-in-law must play by the rules.