LegiStorm

Each year in mid-June, reporters madly scramble to the House and Senate records rooms to get copies of the personal financial disclosures for members of Congress. This year LegiStorm hopes to make that scramble unnecessary for many reporters.

We have received word that the Senate financial disclosures are to be released Friday morning. If all goes as planned, we think we can have the records on our site by the end of the morning. The House records are to be released Monday and those too, we hope to have up by noon of that day.

Financial disclosures for congressional aides will take longer. While member disclosures are made available by the Congress in electronic form on CDs for those who pay for it, disclosures for staffers must be gathered and uploading in a much more painstaking process that involves finding them on congressional computers, then printing, scanning and uploading them. We hope to have our first staffer data available by Tuesday of next week but it will take days to get the more than 2,000 disclosures organized onto the web.

Personal financial disclosures are vital sources of information about potential conflicts of interest that legislators and their staff might have. Since LegiStorm's February launch of the first online database of personal financial disclosures for congressional aides, at least five current and former chiefs of staff have been accused publicly of impropriety involving matters that were disclosed - or should have been disclosed - on their financial disclosures. LegiStorm's publication of these records has been quite controversial on Capitol Hill but has been praised by many publications and public interest groups.

Russell Caso, a former chief of staff to Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), admitted his wife received payments from a group with ties to the Russian government but he did not report the payments on his personal financial disclosure as required, according to The Journal's anonymous sources with knowledge of court documents. Caso pleaded guilty to not disclosing the payments in December, but the origin of the funds wasn't known until now. The sources identified International Exchange Group as the source of a $19,000 payment for "editing work." The WSJ quotes a speech by Weldon in which he said the company had ties to senior Russian military, intelligence and political officials.

Caso's undisclosed payments are part of a larger corruption probe looking at Weldon, as well as a Justice Department inquiry into companies with Russian ties who are suspected of trying to gain improper influence in Washington.

The case points out yet again the usefulness of the personal financial disclosures of congressional staffers that we published in February to a surprising amount of controversy. The disclosures give a needed look at possible conflicts-of-interest by powerful staffers and members of Congress when everything is reported correctly. But often, the most interesting things about disclosures are what is left out.

Due to user demand, we have added a small new feature to our website: salary totals by year.

On staffer pages, this means that you can see the total paid in any one calendar year or fiscal year (unfortunately, the Senate reports their salaries in six-month semesters beginning Oct. 1, so only fiscal year reporting is available).

You can see a sample staffer page here: http://www.legistorm.com/person/Huma_Abedin/2909.html. Note that the annual amounts can be misleading. They do not represent the annual rate of pay. Instead, they merely reflect all gross salary payments made in that year (as always, taxes and other deductions are included but not broken out and expense reimbursements are not included). As a result, it is important to see if the aide worked for the full period or merely a fraction of the time.

We have also provided annual tallies on member pages, but these tallies include all staff salaries from the year. A member's page looks like this: http://www.legistorm.com/member/526/Rep_Anthony_Weiner.html.

Please let us know what other features small and large that you want to see from us. As always, we are working on many other site improvements that will provide a much richer user experience.

In our quest for more historical coverage of congressional aides, we at LegiStorm have just posted two new quarters of House staff salary data from 2002. Our House database is now complete from Jan. 1, 2002 forward. Our Senate data is complete from Oct. 1, 2002 forward.

Speaking of salary data, the House has published its latest books of disbursements meaning that we have been hard at work entering salary data in to our system. These latest books cover the first quarter of 2008. We hope to have the data on our site in mid-June. 

The Senate has not yet released its latest semester of spending data but we expect that to be out any day now.

This afternoon, LegiStorm's site went down for a few minutes of planned downtime to upgrade a server. The upgrade was supposed to improve our overall performance and uptime.

But what was supposed to take only a few minutes turned into a several-hour ordeal.

We apologize for any inconvience users faced while we were down. This should lead to longer-term stability.