In the News
Huffington Post: Two Very Different Donalds, One White House Goal
Carrie Levine, CPI
Former colleague Jones, while stressing that he isn’t familiar with the details of McGahn’s representation of Trump, said part of McGahn’s job is obviously dealing with the intricacies of arcane campaign finance law…
“Sometimes, the popular answer may not be the right answer. There’s a difference between making a sound bite about money and politics and truly understanding the interaction between money and politics and the federal government,” Jones added.
Brad Smith, a former FEC chairman who now leads the Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit that advocates for less campaign finance regulation, said: “Lawyers have to represent the interest of your client, but I think good lawyers also try to take on the old term of counselor and counsel their clients as to true long-term interest.”
Donor Privacy
Daily Signal: Why Donors to Nonprofits Need to Be Protected From the IRS
Genevieve Wood
Congressional calls for the impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen are once again making headlines. In an interview with The Daily Signal, Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing numerous conservative groups targeted by the IRS, explains why Koskinen should never have been appointed in the first place and why current laws need to be changed to protect donors to nonprofit groups from being targeted and audited by the agency.
Independent Groups
New York Times: Women’s Rising Influence in Politics, Tinted Green
Nicholas Confessore
Forty-three percent of all reported contributions to federal candidates for this election have come from women, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by Crowdpac, a political crowdfunding website, higher than any election cycle on record. Women have also provided a fifth of all individual contributions to super PACs for this election, compared with just 1 percent in 2010, the year the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision paved the way for new levels of giving to outside groups…
Democrats like Mrs. Clinton have benefited from groups like Emily’s List, which was founded in the mid-1980s to elect Democratic women who are abortion rights advocates, and in the process has helped build a growing network of female donors in the party. Emily’s List alone has bundled more than $37 million for Democrats in this election cycle, a record pace for the organization and far more than any fund-raising effort on the right for female candidates.
But even among Republicans, female donors are playing a more significant role. Some of the largest contributors to super PACs in the Republican primary have been women, including Diane Hendricks, the billionaire chief executive of a Wisconsin-based roofing and building supplies company, and Karen Buchwald Wright, the head of an Ohio company that makes compressors for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Washington Post: Here’s how much money was burned trying to stop Donald Trump
Philip Bump
This, folks, is what “stop Trump” looked like. Between the beginning of January and the beginning of May, independent groups spent $20.4 million against Trump that was reported to the Federal Election Commission.
The big money started to come in after Nevada.
Among the biggest spenders in the FEC reports were Our Principles PAC, a group started by a former Mitt Romney campaign staffer, which spent $18 million. Club for Growth’s political arm spent $11.4 million. And American Future Fund, a PAC supporting John Kasich, spent $12 million.
And, again, that number doesn’t capture everything. CNN’s Jake Tapper cited reporting from Kantar Media indicating that over $75.7 million was spent running anti-Trump ads on network television.
International Business Times: Where Does The Anti-Trump Money Go Now? Donald Trump’s Opponents Have Millions Of Dollars Left
Ned Resnikoff
Over the past year, Republican super PACs and campaign committees have spent millions of dollars in an attempt to keep Donald Trump from becoming their party’s general election candidate. That attempt failed, and Trump is the presumptive nominee.
As a result, the forces that once opposed Trump have been left with no clear mission — and millions in unspent funds. The dilemma applies to both anti-Trump super PACs and the campaign committees for his former opponents. A handful of his former opponents ended their campaigns with millions of dollars in cash still at their disposal…
“The people who run super PACs work in [Washington] D.C. and they’ve got to maintain their relationships with donors,” she told IBT. “They do have to be somewhat open and honest so as not to upset the people who gave them money.”
That means a super PAC that raised money by opposing Trump is not likely to turn around and start spending big on pro-Trump ads, if only because that would alienate contributors. If a super PAC does find a new mission, it’s likely to be more closely aligned with the old mission.
Los Angeles Times: Be nice to Hillary Clinton online — or risk a confrontation with her super PAC
Evan Halper
Hillary Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.
In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.
The plan comes as Clinton operatives grapple with the reality that her supporters just aren’t as engaged and aggressive online as are her detractors inside and outside the Democratic Party.
The lack of engagement is one of Clinton’s bigger tactical vulnerabilities, particularly when compared with rivals like Donald Trump, whose viral social media attacks are legion, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is backed by a passionate army of media-savvy millennials.
Supreme Court
Atlantic: The Supreme Court’s Next Big Fight Over Money in Politics
Richard L. Hasen
A special three-judge federal district court has been convened in Washington, D.C., to consider the law in light of recent campaign-finance rulings by higher courts. The suit, brought by the Republican Party of Louisiana, is being litigated by Jim Bopp, the attorney who successfully navigated Citizens United and other related cases to the Supreme Court. A key argument in the suit is that cases like Citizens United have called into question the constitutionality of the “soft-money” ban. Chief Justice John Roberts, in the 2014 McCutcheon case, seemed to invite such a challenge, raising the possibility that money given to strengthen parties deserves special First Amendment protection.
Washington Post: Roberts emphasizes high court’s restraint, independence
Robert Barnes
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. last week showed he has no intention of inserting himself into the current political controversy over filling the seat on the Supreme Court left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
But in a 10-minute answer to a question in an Embassy Suites ballroom in northwest Arkansas, Roberts made clear what he does consider his job to be as the nation’s 17th chief justice: a fierce defender of the judiciary’s independence and a firm believer in judicial restraint…
Candidates and Campaigns
CNBC: Finance chair: Trump can’t self-fund in the general election
Lenore Fedow
“Given the size and the scale of this, and we are going to be raising over $1 billion, I don’t believe that anybody would expect that he would be funding that himself,” said Mnuchin on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley.”
The Trump campaign will be relying on a mix of party cooperation and gifts from supporters, according to Mnuchin. The campaign is in the process of signing a joint fundraising agreement with the party, he said. Small-and-medium-size gifts will play a large role in fundraising as well.
Forbes: Donald Trump Has A Valued Customer In The Campaign To Make Him President
Robb Mandelbaum
All told, the campaign has paid Trump entities $4.3 million through March 31, according to Federal Election Commission records. That amounts to nearly ten percent of the campaign’s total expenditures, and taken together are second only to Rick Reed Media, a G.O.P. advertising consultant.
If Donald Trump were spending his own money to fund his campaign, as he often claims in his speeches, there might not be much more to say than to applaud his good business sense — why pay a competitor when you can just pay yourself? But in fact, Trump has taken outside contributions totaling $12 million as of the end of March, or a quarter of what he’s spent so far in the primary. The balance came from loans by Trump to his campaign, which could repay the debt with contributions raised in the general election.
The States
PennLive: Gov. Wolf, Republicans ready to talk campaign finance reform
Candy Woodall
By the end of April, at least 12 campaign finance reform bills were being sponsored by House Democrats.
Democratic Sen. Jay Costa is also renewing his push for beefed up laws, and Republican leaders say they’re also open to discussions.
Wolf said campaign finance is the “overarching issue” that’s “part of everything we do here.”
The debate is about what needs to change.
Wolf, in his continued pledge for transparency, wants more disclosures.
KVOA Tucson: Legislature approves bills amending campaign finance laws
Ryan Van Velzer, Associated Press
Republican Sen. Adam Driggs of Phoenix added back in the campaign finance penalties including a provision that makes it illegal for people to make political contributions in the name of another person.
The Senate passed House Bill 2297 on a 17-11 vote Saturday.
The bill now moves to the governor’s desk beside a second measure that borrowed language from the same campaign finance rewrite to relax rules on anonymous political spending ahead of the August primary election.
The House passed House bill 2296 on a 31-25 vote Friday confirming an amendment added in the Senate.
Helena Independent Record: Campaign regulator urges judge to bar Wittich from office
Matt Volz, Associated Press
A jury in April found that Wittich took $19,599 in illegal and unreported in-kind contributions from an anti-union organization during his 2010 campaign for state Senate. District Judge Ray Dayton now must impose penalties, and he has set a June 17 hearing to decide the matter.
Jarussi, who is representing Commissioner of Political Practices Jonathan Motl, urged Dayton to throw the book at Wittich because the seriousness of case and because of Wittich’s refusal to accept responsibility.
New York Daily News: Bill de Blasio’s depressing defense: The mayor’s excuses have echoes of ‘This is the business we have chosen’
Harry Siegel
Certain hypocritical people, says Mayor de Blasio, seem to want to criminalize politics, and his in particular. This as he’s lawyered up in response to five intertwined corruption investigations.
It’s a new spin on the old cliché about how just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Call it de Blasio’s rule: Just because they’re out to get you doesn’t mean you’re not guilty.
