Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

The agency that polices America’s elections is paralyzed. The blunt FEC chair on why that’s bad for 2020.

"There’s no accountability’: Trump, White House aides signal a willingness to act with impunity in drive for reelection"

by Julia Terruso, Updated: October 3, 2019- 6:12 PM


Carolyn Kaster / AP

The chair of the Federal Election Commission, in her signature forthright style, on Thursday morning retweeted a statement she’d made in June, adding the comment: “Is this thing on?”

Ellen Weintraub, a member of the commission since 2002, wanted to remind the Twitterverse that foreign interference in U.S. elections is illegal.

“Let me make something 100% clear ... ,” the statement read. "It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election. This is not a novel concept. Electoral intervention from foreign governments has been considered unacceptable since the beginnings of our nation.”

Ellen L Weintraub
@EllenLWeintraub

Is this thing on? ?? https://twitter.com/EllenLWeintraub/status/1139309394968096768 …
Ellen L Weintraub
@EllenLWeintraub

I would not have thought that I needed to say this.



Twitter

The reminder came Thursday, as President Donald Trump admitted and defended pushing Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter; Trump called on China to investigate the Bidens as well.

Weintraub is in a unique position. The agency she heads, tasked with enforcing federal campaign finance laws, is currently toothless in enforcing them. She spoke to students at Temple University on Wednesday, as part of a tour of universities in the region to help educate the public on the rules regarding money in politics.

“It’s a somewhat perilous time for democracy,” Weintraub said. “... People are willing to push the envelope on the laws and I think that’s where it’s really vital to have a body that is willing to push back and to enforce the laws and right now, as you probably know, we can’t really do that.”

Weintraub, a Democrat appointed during George W. Bush’s presidency, is one of three commissioners at the FEC, which has a normal complement of six and needs four members to have a voting quorum. Without the quorum, absent since a commissioner stepped down at the end of August, the FEC can’t investigate complaints, issue opinions, or fine violators.

Historically, commissioners are confirmed in pairs, one Democrat and one Republican. Trump nominated a Republican attorney from Texas, Trey Trainor, nearly two years ago. Senate Democrats have recommended Shana Broussard, an attorney, but neither party has moved forward.

The agency’s staff of about 300 still maintains the huge database of campaign contributions and spending, and collects complaints, although they can’t be acted upon. There’s a five-year statute of limitations. Any flagrant violations of the law could go to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

Weintraub said in remarks to students and in an interview after her appearance at Temple that she is concerned about candidate behavior and foreign influence in a critical election year.

Without a quorum candidate behavior can’t really be checked

When Andrew Yang announced he was going to give $1,000 a month to 10 families to pilot his universal basic income idea, all eyes turned to the FEC to weigh in on whether that violated election law. The agency was mute.

“We can’t tell him,” Weintraub said. So what happens if candidates step out of bounds or into a similar gray area as Yang?

“Not having commissioners there to weigh in on this does perhaps encourage some of the more aggressive actors out there,” she said.

All of this means that the FEC has about 300 enforcement matters on hold; 60 of those are investigations that have been completed, awaiting a decision from commissioners.

Foreign influence remains a “great concern”

Weintraub has consistently voiced concern over the ongoing threat of foreign influence in elections. The FEC has started drafting changes to campaign finance law in light of lessons learned from counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference .. https://www.npr.org/2019/08/01/747234957/proposed-fec-rule-would-further-constrain-foreign-election-contributions .. in the 2016 election.

“We saw it in 2016 and we’re likely to see it again in 2020, in part because I don’t think we’ve done enough to discourage it,” she said.

There are bills in Congress that adopt sanctions against any country that would attempt to intervene in the elections, but they haven’t moved forward.

An Honest Ads Act would require more complete disclosures of who is responsible for advertisements online, but that has not progressed in Congress either. She said it’s appalling to think foreign interference is a “partisan issue.”

Even internally, there is discord at the FEC over foreign interference.

Last weekend Weintraub fired off a tweet storm with a memo she’d written about foreign interference that she said her Republican colleague had blocked from being published in a newsletter. (The colleague, Caroline Hunter, later responded that she didn’t want the commission putting something out that couldn’t be adopted without four votes.)

Ellen L Weintraub
@EllenLWeintraub

1/

Funny story. The @FEC puts out a "Weekly Digest" of everything we do, an immensely helpful public resource. Check it out, and subscribe, here:
https://www.fec.gov/updates/?update_type=weekly-digest …
Latest updates - FEC.gov

Find what you need to know about the federal campaign finance process. Explore legal resources, campaign finance data, help for candidates and committees, and more.
fec.gov
22.6K
9:01 AM - Sep 28, 2019
Twitter

Ad transparency remains an issue

Where ads are coming from has gotten increasingly harder to determine with new platforms. In 2016, Weintraub said Facebook “had no idea what it was doing.” Some ads were bought with Russian rubles, she said.

This time around she credited Facebook for beginning to require disclaimers on all ads, but said transparency shouldn’t be left up to platforms. Determining what is an issue ad and what is a political ad, for instance, can be tricky.

The FEC, she said, is “always playing catch-up,” as new technologies develop. “We’re writing rules to address what happened in the last election.”

https://www.inquirer.com/news/ellen-weintraub-fec-commission-russian-inteference-2020-temple-20191003.html

See also:

How Fundraisers Convinced Conservatives to Donate $10 Million — Then Kept Almost All of It.
[...]
After recruiting thousands of donors for the American Conservative Union — the powerful organization behind the annual CPAC conference — a Republican political operative pushed the same contributors to give millions to a PAC that promised to go after then-President Barack Obama, but then steered much of their donations to himself and his partners.
P - The PAC, called the Conservative Majority Fund, has raised nearly $10 million since mid-2012 and continues to solicit funds to this day, primarily from thousands of steadfast contributors to conservative causes, many of them senior citizens. But it has made just $48,400 in political contributions to candidates and committees. Public records indicate its main beneficiaries are the operative Kelley Rogers, who has a history of disputes over allegedly unethical fundraising, and one of the largest conservative fundraising companies, InfoCision Management Corp., which charged millions of dollars in fundraising fees.
P [ The saga of how politically connected fundraisers used one of the nation’s leading conservative organizations as a springboard for fundraising that mainly benefited the fundraisers themselves sheds light on the growing problem of so-called scam PACs — organizations that take advantage of loosened campaign finance laws to reap windfalls for insiders while directing only a small portion of receipts to actual political advocacy.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=150185073

Thanks to Mike (Trumper)Pence, Donald Trump is a little bit richer. According to Federal Election Commission records, Pence's PAC, the Great America Committee, has dropped nearly a quarter of a million dollars at Trump properties since 2017. And this past weekend, Pence spent even more when he stayed at Trump's golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, a location more than 180 outrageous miles away from Dublin where his official business took place.
Missing link - https://theweek.com/articles/863014/lackey-chief
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=150963612

Governing by Owning the Libs
When a president’s entire motivation is to antagonize the people who didn’t vote for him.
[...]
The insight of Donald Trump and the people around him, then, is that the spirit of negation is not just for obstructing what your opponents want to do, but can extend to the entire project of being in charge of the government.
P - If you’re weak enough to care, by the way, the Federal Election Commission just joined the list of disabled institutions, with one of its four existing commissioners—out of a body that’s supposed to have six—resigning at the end of August.
P - That leaves it without a quorum and therefore unable to enforce election law. The vacancies are there because the Trump administration abandoned the traditional practice of filling the seats two at a time, by naming one Republican and one Democratic nominee. Instead it submitted a single name, a former Trump campaign lawyer. The libs have been owned.
P - Actually, it's just a lease and the buyout for the U.S. will be a terrific deal.
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