An informed public,
a strengthened democracy.
On Thursday, a court in South Dakota ruled that American Oversight’s lawsuit seeking Gov. Kristi Noem’s travel expense records could proceed — a victory for public accountability.
We sued Noem’s office in September for failing to release documents requested through the state’s public records law, including expense records from trips taken while in office to several partisan events.
Rather than releasing the requested records, Noem’s office has fought in court to avoid public disclosure, relying on unrelated proceedings and misreadings of South Dakota law.
‘Write the Report As You See Fit’
We recently obtained more documents in response to our lawsuit for records from the 2021 election “audit” in Arizona’s Maricopa County that reveal new details about Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan’s contacts with prominent election deniers and Trump allies Patrick Byrne and Michael Flynn.
Ryan Zinke’s Ethics Investigations
In 2018, Trump administration Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke resigned in a cloud of ethics investigations, returning to Washington four years later as a newly elected representative from Montana. This week, he delivered a speech to the House of Representatives blaming the “deep state” for attempting to stop his election and for endangering “the American cowboy.”
Notably, Zinke’s speech offered no evidence to back up his allegations — nor did it make any mention of the multiple scandals that led to his resignation. We began investigating a range of concerns about Zinke’s conduct in office in 2017, and helped to uncover a number of issues, including: