Campaign for Accountability

Mission and organization

The CfA is a Washington, D.C.-based ethics watchdog group. It states that its mission is to "hold those who act at the expense of the public good accountable for their actions" through "research, litigation and aggressive communications to expose misconduct and malfeasance in public life." CfA states that it particularly targets actions taken in "corporate boardrooms, government offices, and shadowy nonprofit groups" that harm Americans.

The CfA is a non-profit organization with 501(c)(3) status.

History and staff

CfA was co-founded in May 2015 by Anne Weismann (who serves as the group's executive director) and Louis Mayberg (who serves on the group's advisory board). Both were formerly part of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW): Weismann was the group's chief counsel for ten years and Mayberg was the group's former chairman and founder. Weismann is also past president of the American Society of Access Professionals and a member of the OpenTheGovernment.org steering committee. The CfA's deputy director, Daniel Stevens, was a senior researcher at CREW.

Activities

In May 2015, the CfA filed a lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to compel the agency to promulgate a regulation requiring corporations to disclose their political contributions that would inform investors how corporations are spending their money. The CfA acted on behalf of Stephen Silberstein, a shareholder of Aetna Inc. who had unsuccessfully sought to gain information on the company's political contributions. In January 2016, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the suit, ruling that the plaintiff had not demonstrated that SEC had a "clear legal duty" to open a rulemaking proceeding or that its failure to do so was arbitrary and capricious.

In November 2015, the CfA asked the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the Federal Election Commission to get to the bottom of allegations that the Macau casino operations of Sheldon Adelson's Las Vegas Sands Corp. are tied to organized crime. Weismann said that "Given the extent to which Mr. Adelson's wealth derives from Macau and his dominant role in funding Republican candidates, it seems highly likely that illegal foreign money has made its way into American elections." A spokesman for the Las Vegas Sands Corp. denied the allegations, and the CfA subsequently issued a retraction of its statement, saying: "The available evidence supports further investigation into these alleged matters but does not support the statements made by CfA outside of its filings" with the Senate committee and the FEC.

In December 2015, the CfA asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate David H. Stevens, the chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association and the former commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration, for possible violations of "revolving door" ethics laws. The National Legal and Policy Center joined this call several months later.

In January 2016, the Center for Responsive Politics published a report showing that the largest contributors to the campaigns of Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, were the tenants of a commercial building that the senator owns in Chattanooga. Stevens of CfA said that a tenant's ties to Corker raise questions on whether it was paying fair market value in rent. Separately, the CfA filed ethics complaints against Corker with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Senate Ethics Committee, accusing him of insider trading in three particular hedge funds. Corker denied the allegations, calling them "categorically false" and "baseless."

In March 2016, the CfA, made a request to Kim Davis—the controversial county clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, who had gained international attention the previous year after defying a federal court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples—for access to public records under the Kentucky Open Records Act. The CfA specifically sought copies of retainer agreements and lawyer-client engagement agreements between Davis and Liberty Counsel, the religious advocacy organization that represented Davis in the marriage-license dispute. Liberty Counsel, which responded to the request on Davis' behalf, refused to comply, arguing that the documents were preliminary and private records not subject to the Act. The CfA appealed to the Office of the Kentucky Attorney General, which under Kentucky law has the authority to make binding rulings on the Open Records Act, and resubmitted its request to Davis' office in April 2016. In May 2016, the Attorney General's Office sought to privately review the records at issue to determine if an exemption applied, but Liberty Counsel refused to make most of the documents available for a private review. In an opinion issued on June 30, 2016, the Attorney General's Office made a finding favorable to the CfA, determining that Davis had violated the Open Records Act, saying that her conduct had the effect of "intentionally frustrating the attorney general's review of an open records request" which "would subvert the General Assembly's intent behind providing review by the attorney general."

In April 2016, the Campaign for Accountability launched the "Google Transparency Project", a website on "the company’s influence on government, public policies, and our lives.". Funding for the project, and for the Campaign, was not disclosed, but in August 2016 Ken Glueck of Oracle confirmed that Oracle, who had been conducting a high profile lawsuit against Google, was one of the funders.