John,

September’s been a busy month of complaints and investigations here at CREW—here are some recent updates you might have missed:

Rep. Madison Cawthorn recently repeated false claims about the validity of the 2020 election and warned that if future elections “continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen,” it would “lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.” This violent rhetoric is dangerous and undermines our democracy. This isn’t the first time he’s made statements like this, but it should be the last time it goes unpunished. We sent a complaint calling for Cawthorn to be stripped of his committee assignments, much as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was after her statements advocating violence against public officials and claiming that mass shootings were faked. Read more here.
Marc Short, Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, apparently failed to file a final financial disclosure report upon leaving the White House in January 2021—which would violate the Ethics in Government Act and Office of Government Ethics regulations. That’s concerning on its own, but it’s made even more alarming by the fact that Short reportedly held stock in companies affected by the government’s pandemic response, and met with several of those companies in spring 2020. This termination financial disclosure report would help shed light on that apparent conflict of interest. Read more about our complaint to OGE here.
In 2019, a State Department whistleblower accused then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and members of his staff of a litany of serious misconduct, including misuse of government resources on personal and political activities potentially prohibited by the Hatch Act, verbal abuse of employees by Mike and Susan Pompeo and directives to staff not to communicate in writing in order to evade transparency laws. CREW just recently obtained the newly-unredacted report, which sheds new light on serious abuses—and highlights exactly why President Trump’s May 2020 firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, whose office was investigating the complaint, was so damaging for accountability. Read our full writeup here.

These are just a few examples of what CREW’s been up to lately—we’ve also been working to hold GM accountable for their campaign donations to insurrectionist members of Congress, advocating for the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, and launching new FOIA investigations each week. If you’d like to support our work getting answers and fighting abuses of power, please consider making a donation—supporters like you make it possible for us to keep up the fight.

Thank you,

The CREW Team

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