About TIP
Last updated: July 2026
Tooms Intelligence Platform (TIP) is a public-record intelligence system built and edited by Christopher Smoot. Every article on this site traces back to a primary source document — a bill, an opinion, a Federal Register notice, or an FEC filing.
Who runs TIP
Christopher Smoot is a civil-rights and transparency journalist and investigative reporter. He founded and runs the platform end-to-end: editorial, sourcing methodology, and the software infrastructure that ingests public records from Congress.gov, CourtListener, FederalRegister.gov, and the FEC.
Verifiable credentials
- Freed Promise Project — civil-rights reporting project focused on documenting the gap between constitutional guarantees and how they're actually enforced in local jurisdictions.
- Putnam County investigative work — ongoing coverage of county-level government, law-enforcement conduct, and public-records access in Putnam County, Florida.
- Data Science & Software Architecture — 20+ years building web and data infrastructure, backed by formal certification in Data Science. This technical background is how TIP's ingestion pipeline (OCR + LLM-assisted analysis + primary-source cross-linking) exists at all. View Christopher's LinkedIn profile for full professional references and credentials.
Methodology
Every TIP article starts with a primary source document — never a press release, never another outlet's write-up. The document is ingested, its text and metadata are extracted, and an LLM-assisted analyst summarizes it. Every claim in the summary is anchored back to the specific passage of the primary source that supports it.
If a claim can't be traced to a source, it doesn't get published. If we're uncertain, we say so. If we're wrong, we correct it — publicly, with a dated note.
Sources we track
- Congress.gov — bills and resolutions across House and Senate.
- CourtListener — U.S. Supreme Court opinions, orders, and emergency applications.
- FederalRegister.gov — rules, proposed rules, notices, and presidential documents.
- Federal Election Commission (FEC) — candidate committees, PACs, and disclosure filings.
What TIP is not
- Not a wire service. We're slower and more careful.
- Not partisan. We report what the document says, then link to it.
- Not a substitute for legal counsel. See our Terms of Use for the full disclaimer.
Contact
Editorial questions, corrections, tips, or civil comment: see the contact page.
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