John, I know that things may feel scary and uncertain right now, so I wanted to reach out to you with this message: We’ve been here before and we are not going anywhere.

Just days after Donald Trump took office in 2017, CREW filed a lawsuit to stop him from illegally receiving payments from foreign governments – and from there we never stopped fighting to hold him accountable to the law and the Constitution and do what we could to curb the worst of his administration’s abuses. We took thousands of legal actions during the Trump presidency to hold him accountable for his blatant corruption and violations of the law.

We have a playbook for this, and we have the expertise to be a check on Trump again and the flexibility and innovative thinking to adapt to new challenges and threats.

When I say that CREW has been fighting back against Trump since day one and that we haven’t stopped the fight, I mean it.

Here are just a few of the actions we took:

1. On January 23, 2017, just days after Trump took office, we filed a lawsuit against Trump to stop him from violating the emoluments clauses of the Constitution by illegally receiving payments from foreign and domestic governments.
2. We tracked more than 3,700 conflicts of interest created by Trump’s failure to divest from his businesses.
3. We filed *multiple* complaints with the IRS after the Trump Foundation appeared to illegally give $25,000 to a political organization associated with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi while her office was reportedly considering joining a lawsuit involving Trump University and failed to disclose the contribution.
4. We called for the obstruction of justice investigation (which became the Mueller investigation) of Trump after he fired FBI director James Comey.
5. We sued the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency on March 14, 2018 for their failure to disclose records under the Freedom of Information Act about meetings between President Trump and Russian officials.
6. We raised the alarm about the national security threat posed by Mar-a-Lago long before the Department of Justice indicted Trump for his illegal retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
7. We filed numerous Hatch Act complaints against senior Trump administration officials after they used their official government positions for political activity, which the Office of Special Counsel found to be violations in more than a dozen cases.
8. We filed a conflict of interest complaint against (and called for an investigation into) Ivanka Trump for participating in the implementation of Opportunity Zones while her husband Jared Kushner benefited from the program.
9. We filed four criminal complaints over Trump’s Stormy Daniels hush money payment, long before Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg indicted Trump over similar allegations—for which he was found guilty last summer.
10. We held Trump’s cabinet accountable too, tracking ethics scandals involving his Secretary of Energy, Secretary of State, Secretary of Health and Human Services and more. We even filed a criminal complaint against Trump’s Treasury Secretary Wilbur Ross for possibly violating federal conflict of interest laws by participating in multiple meetings with companies tied to his financial interests.

And when Trump lost reelection in 2020, we didn’t stop fighting to hold him accountable. In fact, we had to fight harder than ever after the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

We led the charge for Trump’s impeachment after the release of a stunning tape in which President Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to flip the state for Trump. We pushed back against his election lies—which members of Congress seized on. From there, we monitored corporate contributions to the “Sedition Caucus” (AKA: the members who voted against certifying the 2020 election results) and fought to stop insurrectionists from holding office.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars any person from holding federal or state office who took an “oath…to support the Constitution of the United States” as an “officer of any State” and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to insurrectionists.

CREW went to court in New Mexico, arguing that the attack on the Capitol was an insurrection and that Couy Griffin, Otero County Commissioner, having participated in the insurrection, was disqualified from serving under the Constitution. We won that case, and Griffin was removed and barred from office.

We took the very same argument all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to remove Donald Trump from the ballot for inciting the insurrection.

We represented Republicans and unaffiliated voters in our 14th Amendment lawsuit in Colorado to disqualify Trump from the ballot. We won our case in Colorado, but when Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, the Court turned its back on the Constitution and allowed him to remain on the ballot.

But John, we didn’t let that loss stop us from continuing our fight. We turned our focus to defeating last minute election rule changes in Georgia—and sizing up Trump’s national security, authoritarian and corruption threats.

As you can see, we’re not afraid of taking big swings. We take on the biggest legal fights and the most powerful opponents.

That means we know what this fight will take, because we’ve been here before.

Time and time again, Donald Trump has broken the law and abused his power, and CREW has been there to hold him accountable.

We don’t know what the next four years will hold, but we do know that we will continue to hold Trump accountable for his blatant corruption and violations of the law and keep fighting to preserve an ethical democracy in the United States.

At CREW, we’ll keep helping to demand accountability, for as long as it takes. We’ll continue to take legal action to demand transparency from the Trump administration and to hold him to the law. And we’ll keep up our long term work to build a better democracy and more ethical government.

Thank you,

Arielle Stogner
Senior Vice President
CREW