McClatchy_journos

Kevin: I am not sure why there's a perception of lack of Americans, there are many, they're just not of the stature of the prime minister of Britain. We have more coming out in coming weeks, and there is plenty that was in there but just not enough to get over the finish line. And I would note we are cautioning that higher profile Americans might still be in here, because most of the older data allowed a much greater degree of anonymity, so in many case we don't know. but there are plenty of Americans in these docs for plenty of reasons

Nick: Because many of them haven't been accused of misdeeds or are not otherwise noteworthy.

We are focusing our reporting on people who misused or have been accused of misusing their offshore companies, or are otherwise tied up in alleged wrongdoing. That was true whether the person was American or foreign.

There are many legal reasons to own an offshore company.

That's a lot of "ifs," but even assuming all that, it is a crime to use foreign money to influence U.S. elections. That's one element of the law that was not affected by Citizens United. The NRA could have, and may have, accepted money from just about any domestic source in any amount

Kevin: I think there has been deafening silence on CapHill, and only Sanders has ventured as candidate to opine on the docs. It might come up in the coming Clinton-Sanders debate. I'd like to see more discussion from Hillary C on how the offshore world undermines State Dept efforts at promoting democracy, transparency etc. Look at Brazil, which had looked to be turning the corner but instead now finds politicians across the spectrum with secret shell companies.

Kevin: I'd add to Tim's comments that we found emails where it was clear they filtered all US customers, fearful they could be IRS or some other agency. To the contrary, we were obviously most interested in Americans in the files and did our best to dig it out. But I spent a lot of time looking at foreigners who set up shells in the US to hide assets abroad, and Tim was based in Mexico and looking at that country and CentAm, from where everything from drugs and immigration to good governance or lack there of dot the bilateral relationships. The world is gray, not black and white, and we tried to hit on as many angles and possibilities as possible. There's been this murmuring that someone we were out to get Russia, au contraire, the Russian data was simply the richest, with a level of detail that simply didn't exist in most other offshores.