How A Receipt
Gets Made.
We publish this so the work can be tested. Every claim in Burn The Playbook traces to a primary record. Below: the records we anchor to, the confirmation gate, the five-round review, and what happens when we get something wrong. If we cannot stand behind the work, the receipt does not run.
The Records Behind Every Claim.
BTP does not run a claim it cannot show you the basis for. The basis is almost always a public record. These are the record-classes we work from — primary first, then corroboration.
- Campaign finance
- FEC filings — itemized contributions, independent-expenditure reports, leadership-PAC and joint-fundraising-committee disclosures, conduit and earmark records.
- Congressional disclosure
- House Clerk and Secretary of the Senate filings — STOCK Act periodic transaction reports, annual financial disclosures, travel and gift disclosures, lobbying registrations and quarterly LD-2 reports.
- Securities
- SEC filings — Forms 3, 4 and 5, 13D/13G beneficial-ownership reports, 8-Ks, proxy statements, and enforcement actions.
- Courts
- PACER dockets and filed pleadings — complaints, indictments, settlements, consent decrees — plus state-court records where the matter is litigated there.
- Oversight
- Inspector-general reports, GAO findings, congressional-committee transcripts and exhibits, and on-the-record hearing testimony.
- Agency filings
- Federal Register notices, FOIA returns, contract and grant records (USAspending.gov, SAM.gov), FARA registrations, and IRS Form 990s.
The Six Steps. Every Story.
- 01
Source — primary first
Every receipt opens with a primary document. Filings, court records, transcripts, FOIA returns. We do not lead with paraphrase. We do not lead with a tip. If the basis of a claim is a record, that record is named, linked, and — where we can — archived against later deletion.
- 02
Confirm — the two-of-three gate
A claim becomes a receipt only when independent sources corroborate it. The standard is two of three: an assertion needs at least two independent confirmations — a document plus a second document, or a document plus an on-the-record source — before it runs. Where the primary record is itself dispositive (a recorded vote, a filed complaint, an on-the-record transcript) it stands on the record alone. This is enforced in the publishing pipeline: a receipt that does not carry at least two sources will not build.
- 03
Right of reply — 72 hours
Every named subject is offered the receipt — with the underlying documents — at least seventy-two hours before publication, with that window to respond on the record. Their reply prints in full, unedited, attributed, at /right-of-reply. Silence prints too: the Wall tracks who was offered the reply and said nothing.
- 04
Review — five rounds before publish
Before a receipt that names a person publishes, it goes through a fixed five-round pre-publish review: (1) voice and framing — is the claim stated plainly, no subtweets, no blind items; (2) sourcing — does every claim trace to a record, is the two-of-three gate cleared; (3) the document check — does the underlying filing actually say what we say it says; (4) legal exposure — read for fairness and defamation risk, with outside counsel where the stakes warrant it; (5) the bar — does the finished receipt clear a 9.5-out-of-10 standard on accuracy and clarity, or does it not run.
- 05
Publish — with the document
When a receipt runs, the underlying document runs with it. PDF, transcript, filing — embedded, downloadable, linkable. The reader does not have to take our word for it; the word is right there.
- 06
Correct — visibly, immediately
When we get something wrong we say so at /corrections, with the original wording preserved beside the corrected wording and the editor’s name attached. Facts are corrected within twenty-four hours of confirming the error; misquotes within four hours, with the source recording linked. We do not silently update. We do not memory-hole.
What We Do Not Do.
- We do not run anonymous quotes.
- We do not paraphrase to soften.
- We do not bury names in paragraph fourteen.
- We do not give the subject of a receipt the right to choose which questions are on the record.
- We do not take advertising, sponsorships, foundation grants tied to coverage, or donations from anyone who has been the subject of a receipt in the prior year.
- We do not break our own rules to chase a scoop.
- We do not put any of this behind a paywall. The receipts, the documents, and this methodology are free, and they stay free.
— Adopted at founding. Last revised May 2026.
Michael Starr Hopkins.
Burn The Playbook is written and edited by Michael Starr Hopkins — an attorney; a former Democratic speechwriter and communications director; an op-ed columnist whose work has run in The Hill, The Daily Beast, HuffPost, and Fox News; and a political analyst on national cable news. He founded BTP to do the accountability reporting the cycle keeps skipping. The work and the accountability belong to the same person — see the full masthead and the press archive.