John,

We already knew that Donald Trump incited an insurrection.

But the last month of January 6th Committee hearings have made it crystal clear that Trump likely committed crimes including seditious conspiracy, and knowingly urged his heavily armed supporters to descend on the United States Capitol.

What’s more—six members of Congress and Trump allies like Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani were so concerned about their own actions around January 6th that they sought pardons.

Those six members of Congress—Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks, Scott Perry, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert and Marjorie Taylor Greene—are all members of the Sedition Caucus, the group that voted to reject one or more states’ 2020 electoral votes. We’ve already called out the corporations who’ve given to the Sedition Caucus, but giving to the Pardon Caucus should give corporate PACs even more pause. CREW’s new analysis shows that corporations are still giving: these members of Congress have received nearly $100,000 in corporate cash since January 6, 2021.

Corporations should be seriously evaluating whether they want to keep giving not just to the Sedition Caucus, but to the members who went so far in advancing the Big Lie and attempting to overturn a free and fair election that they feared prosecution. It’s not too late for corporations to draw a line and demonstrate a shred of commitment to democracy.

That’s just one piece of what we’ve been up to lately—here’s some more news from CREW:

The Concord Fund—better known as the Judicial Crisis Network—is a dark money group best known for spending millions boosting Trump’s judicial nominees, and for its close ties to Leonard Leo, who played a key role helping select those nominees. We recently obtained the group’s tax returns, which revealed that it raised nearly $50 million in secret money during its last tax year. $50 million to help reshape our judiciary, and no one knows who the donors are: if that’s not damaging to our democracy, we don’t know what is. Read our full investigation here.
As part of our long-running investigation into the law enforcement response to January 6th, we obtained Secret Service memos that revealed that they downplayed the threat posed by the Proud Boys—an extremist group whose rally weeks before January 6th led to 39 arrests. It should have been obvious that the Proud Boys were not an innocuous group, but the Secret Service continued a troubling pattern we’ve seen over and over: law enforcement agencies repeatedly underestimated the threat posed by right-wing and extremist groups backing Trump ahead of January 6th. Read more here.
During the Trump years, the Patriot Fund was allowed to operate as a legal expense fund with multiple beneficiaries—an alarming and unusual situation that created the possibility of donors leveraging influence over executive branch employees by withholding or releasing funds. The Office of Government Ethics has proposed a new rule that would close loopholes and strengthen the requirements around legal expense funds—and we’ve submitted a comment urging them to make the rule even stronger and address possible ethics issues.

With the next two hearings of the January 6th committee next week, we can expect to learn even more about just how far Trump went to try to retain power. Here at CREW, we’ll be fighting for accountability and answers, for as long as it takes.

Thank you,

The CREW Team

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