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.

“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.”

“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.”

The president's well-documented lies and exaggerations are disturbing and unprecedented, but when he openly ignores and ridicules the findings of the U.S. intelligence community, he puts American lives at risk, diminishes our role in the world, and makes us all less safe.