The Center for Public Integrity

The Center for Public Integrity publishes this Web site as a public service and it is a companion to a forthcoming book to be released before the presidential primary season. Over the course of a year, 50 researchers, writers and editors investigated the candidates and the political parties, contacting or interviewing more than 600 people and systematically gathering hundreds of thousands of federal and state records and secondary source material. As part of the Center for Public Integrity's exhaustive, "leave-no-stone-unturned" approach, we examined the biographical history of each of the candidates.

From these materials, we created and updated comprehensive one-of-a-kind databases. To discern their personal financial holdings we culled all available financial disclosure statements and created a database that detailed every cent owned by each politician, along with their incomes. Only by knowing each candidate's financial holdings could we analyze potential conflicts of interest.

The next step was to collect every available contribution record for each politician during his or her entire government career. To reach this goal, Center data analysts spent months gathering and coding donations made on the federal level going back to 1978. To truly examine the financial histories at play, researchers compiled additional documents including state campaign contribution records and the under-reported contributions of soft money going to candidate committees through the 527 system. The result was a truly unprecedented database containing 1,834,513 campaign finance records of the presidential candidates that allowed us to convert federal, state and soft money records into single lists, ranking each candidate's top career donors.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has chosen a fellow member of the Senate and former primary rival John Edwards as his running mate. The Center for Public Integrity profiled Edwards in our New York Times bestselling book, The Buying of the President 2004, an excerpt of which runs below. The Center has also posted a list of Edwards' top career donors, information from his personal financial disclosures, financial reports filed by his various campaign committees with the FEC and by his 527 committee with the Internal Revenue Service, and a profile of the candidate.

John Kerry has made campaign finance reform an issue ever since he first ran for the Senate in 1984. In fact, the Massachusetts Democrat has been such an ardent and outspoken critic of political action committees that he has refused to accept donations from such organizations during all four of his senatorial campaigns.

But the man who has repeatedly decried the influence of PACs on the nation's political system nevertheless began his quest for the presidency by forming one. In December 2001, as a prelude to his presidential run, Kerry created a federal PAC and a non-federal 527 Committee, both named the Citizen Soldier Fund. A number of influential members of Congress, including most of the presidential candidates, have such PACs, commonly known as "leadership committees." Politicians use the leadership committees to win political support by distributing money among various party organizations and candidates across the country. They also use PAC resources to foot travel bills.

Kerry's PAC raised roughly $1 million through the end of 2002 and disbursed nearly all of it. At the time it was formed, the Citizen Soldiers Fund's non-federal account could theoretically have accepted any amount from a donor. But Kerry, perhaps as a concession to the reform constituency of which he was a part, said the fund would not take donations of more than $10,000 from one individual or organization in any year. Just before the McCain-Feingold legislation was to take effect consigning soft money—at least some types of it—to history, the senator couldn't resist one last grab at the political money that he voted to ban. By the end of October, the self-imposed cap was gone.