For organizations that exist to root out official wrongdoing in government, the last four years have been a whirlwind. President Donald Trump blazed new trails in cronyism, corruption, and political opacity, and watchdog groups found a target-rich environment to expose malfeasance and conflicts of interest.
With a markedly more conventional president soon to take office, those groups are now trying to figure out how to maneuver and—in some cases—survive without the drama and content that Trump provided. Some of them have decided not to.
For some, the Trump wars—and investigations into his conduct—will not stop when he leaves office. The outgoing president’s misdeeds, in their view, remain more deserving of precious resources than the man who will soon occupy the Oval Office.
ADVERTISEMENT
“American Oversight is really busy right now,” said Austin Evers, that group’s executive director, in an interview this week. “We have a large number of lawsuits in active litigation, we’re obtaining new documents on an almost daily basis from the government, and a big part of our work [going forward] will be in ensuring that Trump officials face some level of accountability.”
Evers, who served as the Obama State Department’s senior counsel, founded American Oversight in 2017, primarily as an outfit that would do the type of probing document dives that Democrats felt tripped up Hillary Clinton’s chances for the White House. “We’re holding the government accountable because Congress won’t,” he says of the group on his LinkedIn page. American Oversight has filed hundreds of FOIA requests seeking information on the Trump administration and frequently sued the administration to obtain those records.
Asked whether the group would pursue a similar strategy under the Biden administration, Evers said American Oversight would focus instead on continuing to dig up dirt on Trump and his government, and target Trump-aligned officials at the state level. “Consistent with the reason we launched in 2017, American Oversight is going to focus our efforts on where we think we can have the greatest impact,” he said. “My hypothesis right now is that the greatest threat to democracy will be at the state level, with officials who view the president as a model, not a cautionary tale.”
PAY DIRT spoke with a handful of watchdog groups that have been highly active in investigating and pursuing litigation against corruption and official wrongdoing in the Trump administration. And while few appear as uninterested in investigating the Biden administration as American Oversight, there is a general sense among them that probing the incoming presidency will be less fruitful—or attract less interest from donors or the public—due simply to the scale and audacity of ethical lapses over the past four years.
That’s not to say that there won’t be ethical issues worth investigating in the Biden administration. The president-elect’s transition team has been less than forthcoming about the people providing the funds it’s used to staff the new administration and craft its initial policy platform. And some of its nominees to key government positions, such as Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken, are already facing questions over their private financial interests that will likely color confirmation hearings.
But some groups that exist to investigate just those sorts of potential ethics issues are facing competing demands: Many feel that the true scale of ethical wrongdoing in the Trump administration has yet to be fully unearthed. “Americans feel incredibly strongly about the Trump administration, but we actually don’t know that much about what happened,” Evers said. “We have to answer those questions, because if we don’t answer those questions, if we don’t hold those officials accountable, the result will be impunity.”
These groups also are being forced to navigate a funding world in which major donors are trying to sort out a variety of ventures to fund under a new administration. The incentive to invest in down-ballot races (where Democrats suffered unexpected losses) or redistricting battles that will arise soon, will compete against putting money behind broader good-government missions, which may be seen as a lower priority in a Democratic administration—and due to lingering awe at the scale of Trump-era ethical breaches.
“Are all the people who look to us to hold the government accountable, filing complaints, will they have the same energy?” wondered Robert Maguire, the research director at the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
CREW is a D.C. transparency and government-accountability institution. But at the outset of the Trump era, its association with David Brock, a Democratic operative and fundraiser close to the Clinton family, gave the group a whiff of partisanship that it’s tried to overcome in the years since, even as it has dogged the Trump administration with investigations and legal complaints. (Brock left the CREW board in December 2016, but spent inauguration weekend a few months later raising money for the group as part of a plan to, in his words, “kick Donald Trump’s ass.”)
Maguire said in an interview that CREW plans to pursue the same sorts of investigations into the Biden administration that it did into his predecessor. But he worries that the organization’s supporters and like-minded good-government advocates may not see potential ethical breaches in a Biden administration as the problems they are, due simply to the shell shock of the Trump era.
“The worry is that some people might have the sense after Inauguration Day 2021 that by getting Trump out of office, the problem is solved, and that’s not at all the case,” Maguire said. “There were issues with buying access and influence during the Obama administration, just nowhere close to what we saw under President Trump. And going forward, these problems will persist. They just aren’t going to be as constant, flamboyant, and comically inept as we saw during the Trump administration.”
To the extent that ethical lapses in the Biden administration go unaddressed, a new crop of watchdog groups more associated with the political right stands ready to pick up the slack. “As we head into next year, if there are gaps that are needed to be filled, we will certainly take on that role,” said Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of the group Americans for Public Trust, in an interview Tuesday.
APT, which is affiliated with Trump campaign Nevada Co-Chairman Adam Laxalt, was founded this year. It quickly began investigating prominent political interests on the left, including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s massive—and, APT says, legally dubious—financial contributions to national Democrats. It also probed Courier Newsroom, a quasi-news startup affiliated with leading Democratic digital vendors.
Sutherland said APT has already begun investigating incoming Biden administration officials, including through open-records requests designed to ferret out information on individuals who also served in or worked with the Obama administration. “We have demanded accountability and transparency from a variety of groups and politicians from both sides of the aisle,” she said. “That momentum will not change as we head into a Biden administration.”
Though more of a political outfit than a watchdog group, the GOP research firm America Rising also unveiled a huge effort this week to investigate potential ethical breaches in the incoming Biden administration. Dubbed the Biden Accountability Initiative, the effort will “fight back against Joe Biden’s liberal agenda, appointments, and policies,” the group said, with “access to more than 3,000 pages of opposition research on Biden and two years of tracking him on the campaign trail.”
Not every investigation into the Biden administration will be so political. Like CREW and APT, there are plenty of watchdog groups that say they will continue to do what they’ve always done—investigate politicians on both sides of the political aisle—and Biden is no exception.
“Our commitment is to democracy, not to any political party or electoral result,” Tracy King, a spokesperson for the Campaign Legal Center, told PAY DIRT in an email. “President-Elect Biden made commitments to a comprehensive plan to return ethics to government and we plan to hold the administration accountable.”
There are also signs that funding for such efforts will continue, even from progressive donors whose priorities are more in line with Biden’s than Trump’s. “We are longtime funders of organizations that seek to shine a bright light on the actions and decisions of government officials and agencies,” said a spokesperson for the Open Society Foundations, the network of nonprofits affiliated with progressive billionaire George Soros. “The Open Society Foundations views transparency and accountability in government as fundamental to democratic governance, a position reflected in our mission statement.”
But even that spokesperson’s emailed statement, while reaffirming its commitment to ethics and transparency groups that it’s funded lavishly in the past, hinted that its efforts will be, at least in part, retrospective.
“In 2021 and beyond,” the spokesperson said, “we will engage fully to begin mending the profound damage done by the outgoing administration… [by] making investments in causes and issues that are core to our mission and to meet the moment we are in.”
