‘It’s outrageous that the FEC has sat around and done nothing—especially with such a detailed, comprehensive paper trail handed to them,’ lawyer Dan Backer told The Federalist.
Tuesday evening the Committee to Defend the President (CDP) filed a motion in a D.C. federal court seeking to supplement the complaint it had filed against the Federal Election Committee (FEC) in April 2018. In its original complaint, the CDP alleged that the agency responsible for enforcing campaign-finance law failed to act on an administrative complaint the CDP had filed with the FEC. That complaint charged that, during the 2016 presidential election, Democrats illegally funneled approximately $84 million through the Hillary Victory Fund to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which then illegally coordinated with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
To understand the alleged scheme requires familiarity with controlling campaign-finance law and campaign contribution limits. As I explained at the time CDP sued the FEC last April:
Under federal law, ‘an individual donor can contribute $2,700 to any candidate, $10,000 to any state party committee, and (during the 2016 cycle) $33,400 to a national party’s main account. These groups can all get together and take a single check from a donor for the sum of those contribution limits—it’s legal because the donor cannot exceed the base limit for any one recipient. And state parties can make unlimited transfer to their national party.’
This legal loophole allows ‘bundlers’ to raise large sums of money from wealthy donors—more than $400,000 at a time—filtering the funds to the national committees. Democrats and Republicans alike exploit this tactic. But once the money reaches the national committees, other limits apply.
During the 2016 election cycle, Democrats followed this formula, with Clinton, the DNC, and participating state Democratic committees establishing the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) as a joint fundraising committee to accept contributions from large donors. To comply with the law, the HVF needed to transfer the donations to the specified recipients, whether the Clinton campaign, down-ticket Democrats, the DNC, or state committees.
FEC records the CDP reviewed revealed a problem, however: HVF reported several large contributions as received and on the same day (or occasionally the following day) the DNC recorded receiving the same amount of funds from a state Democratic committee, but the state Democratic committees never reported receiving the contribution from the HVF or dispersing the funds to the DNC.
Public statements by former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile further implicated Hillary Clinton with violating campaign finance laws during the 2016 election. Brazile explained that “[a]s Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”
Clinton campaign chief financial officer Gary Gensler similarly stated that the Democratic Party was “fully under the control of the Clinton campaign . . . . The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to...
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