Trump Administration/Executive Ethics

Americans deserve know the full truth and tonight we are taking to the streets to demand it. A four-page whitewash from the Attorney General is not enough. We have a right to know everything that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation uncovered about Russian attacks on our democracy in that nation’s wide-ranging effort to aid Donald Trump in 2016. The vital importance of releasing the full report publicly is hammered home by new reports that members of the special counsel’s team were shocked and frustrated that Attorney General Bill Barr has significantly downplayed their findings which they describe as “alarming and significant.” We need to know because we need to know that our elected representatives are doing what is necessary to safeguard our democracy from ongoing attacks by hostile foreign powers. The full report and underlying documentation must be released to the American people.

"People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook." President Richard Nixon famously said this line during the Watergate scandal in 1973, and Americans deserve to know what President Donald Trump is trying to hide by continually refusing to release his tax returns.

One Sunday morning in February of last year, Paul S. Ryan, an attorney at Common Cause, a grassroots organization that works to uphold democratic principles, got up early, as he regularly does, and read through the latest news. When he came to a story in the New York Times he had been following, he drank some coffee, ate breakfast with his wife and young son, and went to work.Ryan, who is Common Cause’s vice president of policy and litigation, does not regularly work on weekends. But the Times story had new details in an evolving scandal in which the company that owns the National Enquirer had paid $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to buy the rights to a story about her affair with Donald Trump before he became president.

Americans deserve to know the full truth about the Russian attacks on the 2016 presidential election. The full report and underlying documentation from Special Counsel Robert Mueller must be released to the American people. Our tax dollars paid for the investigation and we are the victims of Russia’s sweeping efforts to aid the election of Donald Trump to the White House.

“The investigation has already led to 199 criminal charges, 37 indictments or guilty pleas, and five prison sentences,” explains Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn. “Numerous additional investigations of possible criminal conduct uncovered by the Special Counsel have been spun off to other prosecutors. The string of crimes that have already been unearthed and made public is staggering and unprecedented in our nation’s history.”

“The investigation has already led to 199 criminal charges, 37 indictments or guilty pleas, and five prison sentences,” explains Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn. “Numerous additional investigations of possible criminal conduct uncovered by the Special Counsel have been spun off to other prosecutors. The string of crimes that have already been unearthed and made public is staggering and unprecedented in our nation’s history.”