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Welcome back to the Revolving Door Project’s weekly newsletter, which is getting a new name: Watchdog Weekly. We’ve been writing this newsletter since the end of 2018, through three presidential administrations, two general elections, and an ongoing crisis of corporate accountability. Since the beginning, we’ve scrutinized the subtle ways in which corporate wealth shapes our politics: not only through direct spending and lobbying, but via the revolving door between industry and government, through interest groups and formal and informal networks, media influence, and more. We exist to help fill the vacuum of knowledge about who holds power and how power is wielded. We are watchdogs, and we wanted a name for this newsletter that reflects our mission to shed light on the ways that money corrupts politics which may otherwise evade scrutiny.

A Department of Justice official managed to serve in Trump’s administration without disclosing his financial entanglements publicly – and now, only after his departure, can we highlight his conflicts of interest.

Revolving Door Project condemns the Trump administration’s corrupt pardon of crypto criminal Changpeng Zhao

This week, nothing too unusual happened, which is to say that the Trump administration continued its crusade to further enrich the rich at the expense of everyone else.

The Office of the United States Attorneys has 94 offices (led by 93 Attorneys) across the U.S., Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Each U.S. Attorney is appointed to these districts by the President for a four-year term, and each official serves as the top federal law enforcement officer in their district, and has historically had significant latitude over policy implementation within the district’s borders. 

This week’s stories show that from the Justice Department to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Trump admin is simultaneously eroding, side-stepping, and outright defying the checks and balances that distinguish a government that is accountable to the public from one that exists simply to enrich the elite. 

We’re back for another edition of this newsletter proposing tough questions that need to be asked of Trump’s nominees. This iteration will cover Pam Bondi, the nominee for Attorney General, and Scott Bessent, the nominee to lead the Department of Treasury.

This week’s newsletter highlights three litmus tests of the Biden administration’s commitment to holding the wealthy and powerful accountable to the public interest within their dwindling time in office. 

As the Democratic Party apparatus’s post-election reflections continue this week, they would do well to consider this basic question: Was it smart to run a campaign hinging on your opponent’s blatant corruption and white-collar criminal status, despite the failure of the Biden administration to take tangible steps to address the harms perpetrated by corporations and the wealthy during their time in office?

Corporate revolvers are keeping industry giants from facing real accountability.

The last time she ran for president, Kamala Harris gave a 16-minute interview with then-Mother Jones reporter Rebecca Leber about her vision for tackling the climate crisis. Harris brought evident comfort and energy to the topic, but most striking was the framing to which she returned again and again: corporate accountability.

Donald Trump and his Department of Justice consistently made a mockery of the law throughout his four years in power. And while their laughable reasoning and indefensible positions were struck down at a historic rate, many cases were still waiting for Biden. The new administration tossed out a handful immediately but an alarming number remain, either in some form of pause or advancing forward with the Biden administration adopting Trump’s position.

In response to the lawsuit filed today by the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and eight states, the Revolving Door Project issued the following statement.