Trump Administration/Executive Ethics

"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.”

Paul Manafort purposefully committed bank and tax crimes, was facing 19-25 years in prison, but was only sentenced to 47 months. Meanwhile, a black woman in Texas named Crystal Mason accidentally violated the law while voting in the 2016 presidential election and was sentenced to 5 years. Manafort’s lenient sentence shows something severely wrong with the justice system in our nation. Apparently, too often we have one for the wealthy, white, and politically connected, and another for ordinary people, especially people of color.