News Clips

“Voters don’t get the information they deserve, simply as a result of a group creating its own disclosure regime it imposes on itself,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause.

“The narrowly-tailored questions seem to provide plenty of opportunity to shield relationships, say by routing funds through an intermediary,” said Jay Young, executive director of Common Cause Illinois.

In recent weeks, President Trump ran an ad on Facebook with discredited allegations about former Vice President Joe Biden's relationship with Ukraine. Despite requests from Biden's campaign to take down the ad, Facebook refused, stating the ad didn't violate its policies on political advertising. Facebook's new policy exempts politicians' political ads from third-party fact-checkers. The exemption effectively allows any politician to run ads on the platform that contain deceptive, false or misleading information. Given the president's propensity to lie, it's easy to understand why many are calling this the "Trump exemption."

On the other side of the political divide over Koch, Beth Rotman of the government watchdog group Common Cause said the Kochs and their network of like-minded wealthy donors “undermined so many important American values over the past several decades as part of the Kochs’ attempted corporate takeover of American politics.”

Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for the good government group Common Cause, said lawmakers who provide the information helps promote transparency. "It's critically important for the public to have faith and confidence that their elected officials are doing the people's business, not the bidding of special interests," Scherb said.

“The Special Counsel concluded that the promised ‘documents and information that would incriminate Hillary’ constituted a ‘thing of value,’” the complaint supplement from Common Cause, Campaign Legal Center, and Democracy 21 states. “And that Trump Jr.—and potentially Manafort and Kushner—solicited such a contribution from a person known to be a foreign national.”The supplement concludes: “In other words, the Special Counsel concluded that, at a minimum, Trump Jr. violated the ban on soliciting contributions from foreign nationals.”