News Clips

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.

Aaron Scherb, the legislative director of watchdog organization Common Cause, noted that conservative religious organizations have previously donated large amounts to groups that further their political interests. "The Religious Right and certain conservative religious groups have significant resources at their disposable. As we detailed in a 2015 report, they often flex their political muscle to further enhance their ability to spend big money in politics to drown out the voices of dissenting views," he told Newsweek.

“If she were to maintain the same relationship with this nonprofit and become a candidate, then legal risks do arise,” said Paul S. Ryan, an attorney for the liberal-leaning government watchdog group Common Cause.

“To take a kind of esoteric issue, and executive branch ethics and campaign finance reform, and to bring that to life for people, and then it becomes this viral moment was really incredible,” says Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the grassroots organization Common Cause, and one of the expert witnesses at the H.R. 1 hearing.

“While every presidential administration in our history has had its ethical challenges, we’ve never seen so many corruption scandals and appalling lack of concern for the ethics rules that should govern our executive branch than with this administration,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of the nonpartisan reform group Common Cause.

“Now I’m elected, now I’m in, I got the power to draft, lobby and shape the laws that govern the United States of America. Fabulous,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Now, is there any hard limit that I have in terms of what legislation I’m allowed to touch…based on the special interests funds that I accepted?” “There’s no limit,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause. Ocasio-Cortzed continued, “I can be totally funded by oil and gas, totally funded by big pharma and come in and write pharma laws?” “That’s right,” Hobert Flynn said. Wrapping up, Ocasio-Cortez then added, “We have a system that is fundamentally broken.”