Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

Founded	2003
Founder	Norman L. Eisen, Melanie Sloan
Type	501(c)(3)
Tax ID no.	03-0445391
Key people	Noah Bookbinder, President and Chief Executive Officer CEO
Revenue	$5,989,080 (2019)[1]
Website	CitizensForEthics.org

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) watchdog organization devoted to U.S. government ethics and accountability.^[2][3][4] Founded in 2003 as a counterweight to conservative government watchdog groups such as Judicial Watch, CREW works to expose ethics violations and corruption by government officials and institutions and to reduce the role of money in politics.

Its activities include investigating, reporting and litigating perceived government misconduct, requesting and forcing government information disclosure through Freedom of information legislation requests, and filing congressional ethics complaints against individuals, institutions and agencies.^[5][4] Its projects have included the publication of "CREW's Most Corrupt Members of Congress", an annual report in which CREW lists the people it determines to be the most corrupt in the federal government of the United States. From 2005 to 2014, the annual reports named 25 Democrats and 63 Republicans.

CREW was founded in 2003 by former federal prosecutor Melanie Sloan and white-collar lawyer Norm Eisen who went on to serve as President Barack Obama's chief ethics lawyer and later his ambassador to the Czech Republic. Liberal political consultant David Brock became CREW's chairman in 2014 and stepped down in 2016. He was replaced by Richard Painter, who took a leave of absence to run as a Democrat in Minnesota's 2018 U.S. Senate special election. Under Painter's leadership, CREW pursued aggressive litigation against the Trump administration, which it called the "most unethical presidency" in U.S. history. CREW filed 41 lawsuits during George W. Bush's administration, 38 during Obama's administration and, by January 2018, 180 against the Trump administration.^[6]