News Clips

Much of the enforcement of New Mexico’s conflict of interest and vote recusal rules revolves around voluntary compliance and having other legislators police each other, said Viki Harrison with Common Cause New Mexico, which advocates for stricter ethics laws. New Mexico legislators are not paid a salary and serve only part-time. “When you police yourselves there’s always going to be questions around transparency and cronyism,” she said.

Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, said the latest explanation of the payment — that Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen — does not eliminate the possibility that the payment violated campaign finance laws. “A lot of contradictions coming out of Team Trump this morning,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview with The New York Times. “This payment was to influence the election,” he added. And he said new details about the payment and repayment could raise additional legal problems because it might violate campaign finance laws about straw donors that prohibit making a donation in the name of another person.

“As someone who has worked on these issues for decades, I have never seen such a public interest,” Karen Hobert Flynn, president of nonpartisan government watchdog Common Cause, told Newsweek. She credits ethics experts like Painter for contributing to that interest. “Having attorneys who specialize in this, that can explain what the law says and what the administration was doing, and could do it in ways that were accessible and understandable, I think people become hungry for it,” Hobert Flynn said. She added that her group has added 40,000 small donors since Trump took office and that fundraising is up 175 percent year over year.