In the backdrop of a highly polarizing election year, Bloomberg investigates changing culture at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a high profile government watchdog group. According to the group’s website, the “Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to promoting ethics and accountability in government and public life by targeting government officials who sacrifice the common good to special interests. We advance our mission using a combination of research, litigation, policy advocacy, and media outreach. CREW employs the law as a tool to force officials to act ethically and lawfully and to bring unethical conduct to the public’s attention.”
However, Bloomberg reports that “Over the past two years…some of the group’s most influential work has been quietly dropped. Annual rankings of the “most corrupt” members of Congress and a bi-annual list of the “worst” governors have stopped. A pipeline of in-depth reports on issues ranging from financial markets to timber-industry lobbying has gone dry. The group walked away from a spat over Hillary Clinton’s treatment of e-mails as secretary of state, even after an Inspector General found that CREW’s public records request had been improperly denied.”
The Bloomberg report identifies the addition of prominent Democratic operative David Brock as a Member of the Board in 2014, as a changing point in the direction of CREW’s mission, goals and culture. Demonstrating the changing culture associated with Brock’s arrival, Bloomberg highlights the change in CREW’s legal filings. “By 2013, CREW was filing an average of eight federal lawsuits each year, with a peak of 15 in 2007, public records show. In the nearly two years since Brock arrived in August 2014, the group has filed a total of four.”
Co-Founder and former Board Chair of CREW, Louis Mayberg, has pointed to the more partisan orientation of the organization after Brock’s arrival contributed to his decision to resign from the board in March 2015 saying, “I have no desire to serve on a board of an organization devoted to partisanship.”
Nevertheless, CREW’s Communication Director, Jordan Libowitz, has said “The board membership may change, but we have always maintained the highest level of integrity and absolute independence in the work we do—and that remains the case.”
