LegiStorm

We at LegiStorm were fascinated to read a story in Politico this week which polled the offices of all senators to find out where they got their mortgages, especially by the answer of the former head of the Senate banking committee, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

The Politico survey comes after documents reveal that two senators, Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), received preferential treatment on their mortgages from Countrywide after requesting help from the head of the company. So Politico surveyed senators to find out how others received their mortgages. So far, 15 senators have not bothered to answer the poll.

But we were particularly intrigued by the response of Shelby, who headed the Senate Banking, House and Urban Affairs Committee and is still its ranking member. According to Politico, Shelby responded that he has no mortgages on his two homes. In fact, LegiStorm's data indicates that Shelby has a $1-$5 million mortgage with Wells Fargo Bank.

The New York Times values that loan, originally placed with Reilly Mortgage, at $5 million. The mortgage is not on his home but on an apartment complex he owns in Tuscaloosa, Ala. It's not clear whether the mortgage, taken out in 2002 at 6 percent interest, was market rate or not. We will leave that for the experts to determine.

However, our financial disclosure data - covering members and staff alike - can shed some light on this mortgage question. Unfortunately, however, the Congress has exempted the disclosure of mortgages on primary homes, meaning that the vast majority of mortgages go unreported. In light of the brewing scandal over the large mortgage gifts provided to senators, this lack of disclosure would appear to be a glaring oversight.

LegiStorm has now released all Personal Financial Disclosures filed by Senate aides in 2008. The disclosures include the annual reports filed by staffers by the May 15 deadline, as well as letters granting extensions to those staffers who asked for more time to file.

Only certain staffers are required to file disclosures. Generally, those required to file are the highest-paid staffers, who also tend to be the most senior ones who crafting legislation and policy. The disclosures serve as one tool to highlight any possible conflicts of interest or other financial issues involving these key legislative employees.

We have left out a handful of staffers who have filed but who are not listed in our current salary database, such as employees of special commissions. We will be adding them soon.

We have also discovered a bug whereby the staffers are not always listed on the proper senator's page. For example, http://www.legistorm.com/pfd_office/member/Sen_Jim_Webb/819.html shows no staffers filing reports but if you search our site for Legislative Director Michael Sozan, as an example, you do find that Sozan has filed a report here. We hope to fix that bug tomorrow but in the meantime, you should be able to find the financial disclosures by staffer name.

LegiStorm's release of the Senate staffer PFDs comes after we made the disclosures of every Member of Congress available online the same day they were released. Now we are moving on to the larger number of House staffers and we plan to have all of those available within a few days. Our rate is limited mostly by the slow speed of the printers in the House Legislative Resources Center. However, we will post the House financial disclosures as we get them in.

LegiStorm is the only site that has staffers' financial disclosures available online for the public to peruse. As we've said before, we feel these disclosures are vital sources of information. As you look through the disclosures, please leave a comment and let us know if you see anything of interest.

LegiStorm released all of the personal financial disclosures of all members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have filed their reports on time. The Monday morning release follows on the heels of LegiStorm's Friday release of disclosures for all senators.

A list of those members of Congress who have filed for extensions is located at http://www.legistorm.com/2008HouseExtensions.pdf. Some of those who have received extensions have already turned in their reports and we have made those available.

The disclosures came to us from the Clerk of the House in sideways fashion (a result of the fact that the original documents are in landscape orientation, but scanners don't typically take documents in landscape format). LegiStorm likes to make these forms more useful to users by rotating them but because of the rush to get the files up on the web, the rotation of the files will have to wait for a little while.

Financial disclosures for senior congressional staff have also been released by the House and Senate. LegiStorm will have those disclosures up on the web over the next week as soon as we are able to scan them.

UPDATE: All of the house PFDs are now rotated for our users' convenience. As you look through the disclosures, please leave a comment if you find anything of interest 

LegiStorm has released the latest available staff salary data from the House of Representatives, covering the first quarter of 2008.

This is the first of two large data releases we expect today. We hope to have all of the financial disclosures on our site by the end of the morning. The Clerk of the House has not made it easy, however, as they have lumped many financial disclosures together in one file, meaning that we have to extract all the individual member financial disclosures from these larger files.

The Senate releases its salary data every six months. The Senate has released the data from the six months ending on March 31, 2008 but we are still busy entering it into our database and editing it. We do not yet have an exact date for our release but think it might be as soon as next week.

The latest personal financial disclosures of U.S. senators are now available at LegiStorm, www.legistorm.com.

Several disclosures have not been released, most notably Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who just ended her bid for the presidency. No reason was provided in the letter from the Secretary of the Senate which granted the extension.

Also filing for extensions were Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R-R.I.)

The financial disclosures cover the year 2007 and must list assets, outside income, spousal employment and other matters of interest to congressional watchdogs. The filings are listed on LegiStorm as 2008 filings because they are were due to the Senate on May 15 of this year.

Disclosures for members of the House of Representatives will be released by the Clerk of the House Monday morning and LegiStorm expects to have all of them posted by noon that day. LegiStorm will add financial disclosures for all congressional aides who must file over the course of the week.