John,
CREW’s President Noah Bookbinder wrote to you yesterday explaining why he still has hope for ethics and accountability, and now just 24 hours later—we have some good ethics news to share with you.
- Special Counsel Jack Smith appealed the dismissal of the classified documents case. Donald Trump must be held accountable for his mishandling of classified documents, and Judge Cannon’s dismissal of the case was a total outlier and wrong on the law and the history.
- Senator Bob Menendez is facing pressure from New Jersey and Senate leaders to resign from the Senate after he was convicted of bribery and acting as a foreign agent. We’ve been calling on him to do so since he was first charged, for the sake of his constituents and all Americans.
- President Biden is reportedly finalizing plans to push for ethics reform for the Supreme Court, including an enforceable ethics code and 18-year term limits—exactly what CREW has been advocating for years. By the way, this is now the mainstream consensus, with 78% of Americans in favor of term limits.
- Meanwhile, the Senate is set to mark up a bipartisan bill banning congressional stock trading next week, likely setting the bill up for consideration by the whole Senate soon. And President Biden will soon be signing the Federal Prison Oversight Act, which will bring much needed accountability to the Bureau of Prisons.
These are all important steps in the right direction—and especially as we’ve faced setbacks and disappointments, it’s important to celebrate the wins.
And these are important wins on CREW priorities that have been a long, long time in the making.
We have one final piece of good news to share: Thanks to support from folks like you, CREW has hit our $50,000 match goal this month (we’re currently at $63,192), and our matching donor has agreed to double down and increase the match to $100,000.
We believe in transparency—so we want to tell you when we hit our goals and let you know that your money is going to good work in a particularly urgent time.
Advocating for accountability has never been more important, and at CREW we’re having real successes. Your donation today will be doubled to support this work today and into the future. Can you make a matched donation today?
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Thank you!
CREW
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John,
We are far from business as usual in American politics right now—especially when it comes to ethics and accountability.
I wanted to reach out with some thoughts about the state of our democracy and where we go from here.
This is an unsettling time, with increasing threats of political violence against everyone from poll workers to elected officials. This past weekend’s horrifying assassination attempt obviously took that to another level.
Attacks like that should never happen, and any day that politicians are targeted with violence is a sad day for our democracy.
Many of us are asking ourselves how we can help the nation move to a better place and “cool the temperature.”
I want to point you to the answer that Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace gave in a recent interview:
“What we need is accountability, not just for this political actor, but for anyone using political violence, such as the January 6 insurrectionists. You stop political violence through accountability, widespread condemnation from your own side and public revulsion.
It’s all of us regular people saying we don’t want this in our society, and we’re going to change how we speak about the other side to make it less common.”
I completely agree with her assessment. Working to counter disinformation with facts, and lawlessness with accountability, is the only way to bring our country back from this very scary spiral of escalating threats and violence.
CREW remains committed to doing just that.
That is why we have consistently acted to demand accountability for the most powerful—not to advance political positions or to justify heated rhetoric, but to stand up for our system of checks and balances, anchored in real facts and law.
Donald Trump, the Supreme Court, members of Congress—and every American—are accountable to the law. That is still true, despite recent devastating court decisions.
The decision in the classified documents case earlier this week is a dangerous outlier with no basis in the law, but it should be and will be appealed by the Department of Justice.
The fallout from the Supreme Court presidential immunity case is much less clear, and the possibilities are alarming, but I can tell you with certainty that there are still paths for accountability for any future president.
Groups like CREW can and will continue to identify violations of criminal law by presidents, though former presidents may not be able to be indicted for official acts. The boundaries of the Court’s decision have not yet been tested—though they likely will be soon. We will not stop calling out misconduct and looking for ways to ensure appropriate criminal accountability.
Meanwhile, presidents can still be sued for civil violations of the law—just like Trump was sued for business fraud, defamation and violations of the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution.
Presidents are also still subject to vigorous oversight by Congress, and Congress should act now to expand its oversight powers to rebalance the scales in the wake of this immunity decision. Congress can and should also pass important reforms to prevent presidential abuses of power, as we laid out in a recent piece.
Believe me, I know that the repeated setbacks are frustrating and disappointing and that we’re in a particularly uncertain time. But advocating for accountability for the most powerful has never been easy, and we have not wavered for a second in our belief that there is a genuine path forward for democracy and the rule of law. We’re not giving up now—indeed, now is the time to redouble our commitment to this work.
Thank you for reading and supporting CREW’s work,
Noah Bookbinder,
President
CREW
P.S. We’re in the middle of a match campaign. A generous donor has agreed to match up to $100,000 in donations to CREW this month. If you can, consider making a matched donation today to support our continued accountability work. Thank you!
If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:
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