congressional-disclosure-research

Congressional disclosure research

Access and scope

Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY to your Crawlora key. Prefer the listed Crawlora MCP tools when connected; otherwise use the bundled scripts/crawlora.sh, which sends x-api-key to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Read reference/endpoints.md for exact methods and parameters. Check application code as well as HTTP status; payloads are inside data. Stop on authentication errors, back off on 429, and retry a transient upstream failure once. Bound pages and calls by the requested scope and credit budget. Preserve source IDs, URLs, retrieval times, and source dates where supplied.

Build a filing inventory or evidence brief from public disclosures. Define chamber, filer identity/type, requested filing window, and whether the question concerns filings, reported assets, or transactions before interpreting results.

Search filings using chamber-specific semantics

• House requires member; its default filer type is member, while candidates use filer_type=candidate and election_year. House from/to take years; candidate rows use year_kind=election, not an exact filing date. House list results do not supply filed_at, so do not invent one from the year.
• Senate supports name prefixes or the member shorthand, but not both together. state cannot be combined with senator_state/candidate_state. Filer and report types follow the exact reference; all cannot be combined with other filer values. Senate from/to accept years or MM/DD/YYYY filing dates.
• ticker is an unsupported compatibility parameter: a nonempty value returns validation error. For an asset question, collect a bounded relevant filing sample, then filter returned transaction rows locally. Do not promise a complete Congress-wide ticker search from the filing index.

scripts/crawlora.sh /congress/stock-disclosures chamber=senate report_type=periodic_transaction from=2026 to=2026 page=1 limit=10
# Use a supported Senate filing_url returned above:
# scripts/crawlora.sh /congress/report url="$FILING_URL"

Retrieve supported documents and retain their evidence

congress_report supports Senate Annual, PTR, and regular extension-notice HTML URLs. House PDFs, Senate paper/image filings, blind-trust and other reports are unsupported by this parser; retain their source links and mark body/transactions unavailable. A filing row is evidence the filing was indexed, not that its transaction details were retrieved. An extension notice's body is a notice, not an asset or transaction table; its structured filer/date fields can be blank.

For supported reports use normalized transactions while retaining parts[].rows, source_part, and row number for verification. Preserve displayed transaction dates, owners (self/spouse/dependent), transaction types, asset names, tickers, amount ranges, comments, and -- placeholders. Separate transaction, reporting-period, filing, and retrieval dates. Filing-window filters do not select an equivalent transaction window; filter parsed transactions separately if needed.

Reconcile and report

Match filers by chamber and available identity evidence rather than name alone. The same transaction may appear in Annual and PTR reports: compare owner, asset, date, type, and range, retain both source rows, and label probable duplicates without collapsing uncertain matches. Keep amendments and original versions traceable; do not infer replacement without document evidence. Do not turn amount ranges into exact values or sum open-ended ranges as precise trade totals. A sale is not a realised profit, an asset entry is not a trade, and a spouse's reported transaction is not automatically the filer's own decision.

Return filing coverage, parsed/unavailable documents, a transaction evidence ledger, unresolved duplicates, and explicit date/range limitations. The sample cannot establish a current portfolio, trading intent, legal wrongdoing, or investment returns. Do not derive legal filing deadlines or recommendations to trade from this workflow.