FEC

The Hill: Officials clash at FEC over confronting Russian influence in 2018 elections

By Lisa Hagen

The heated clash over the topic comes as lawmakers and watchdog groups have been mounting pressure on the FEC to look into Donald Trump Jr.’s emails after recent reports that he accepted a meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign in exchange for compromising information about Hillary Clinton.

Several government watchdog groups filed a complaint with the FEC and Department of Justice, arguing that Trump Jr. violated campaign finance laws by accepting that meeting. And earlier this week, Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to the FEC that calls on the agency to investigate whether Trump Jr. violated those laws…

Some commissioners also poured cold water on the idea of obtaining security clearances and sitting in on other agencies’ investigations. Hunter had some of the fiercest pushback to Weintraub’s proposals and Chairman Steven Walther also appeared hesitant about seeking security clearances.

“Now we want to come along, get security clearances and participate in investigations that we absolutely have no expertise in whatsoever,” Hunter said. “I think we should mind our own house. I think we should do the things that we have more expertise in.”

The Courts

Wall Street Journal: Prosecutors and Political Corruption

By Editorial Board

Has the Supreme Court handed corrupt politicians a free pass? That’s the taunting question following an appellate court’s decision last week to toss the conviction of former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver in the wake of the High Court’s landmark 2016 McDonnell ruling. We think the answer is no, but prosecutors will have to follow the law better than former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara did…

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t vacate Silver’s conviction on grounds that the evidence was insufficient. Judge José Cabranes, one of the country’s most distinguished appellate judges, explicitly wrote for the court that “the evidence presented by the Government was sufficient to prove” the extortion, honest-services fraud and money-laundering counts against Silver…

Judge Cabranes and two colleagues overturned the verdict because the instructions to the jury in the case did not “comport with McDonnell and are therefore in error.” Specifically, wrote the judge, “the instructions did not convey to the jury that an official action must be a decision or action on a matter involving the formal exercise of government power akin to a lawsuit, hearing, or agency determination.”

New York Times: Silver May Start ‘Parade of Horribles’ Out of McDonnell Case, Critics Say

By Alan Feuer

There was a time when political corruption might have been described – as a former Supreme Court justice once said of pornography – as something you knew when you saw it.

But last summer, after the court issued a landmark decision overturning the graft conviction of Bob McDonnell, the onetime governor of Virginia, it became much harder to define what it meant for a politician to partake in an illegal quid pro quo.

After that ruling, many prosecutors and government watchdogs expressed anxiety that the court had created a safe harbor for a subtle, wink-and-nod version of corruption. The court had essentially made it legal, these critics said, for elected officials to enrich themselves by engaging in unseemly forms of transactional politics.

That argument could apply to the case of Sheldon Silver, once the mighty speaker of the New York State Assembly, whose corruption conviction was overturned by an appeals court on Thursday – among the first federal verdicts to be reversed as a result of the McDonnell decision.

Congress

Morning Consult: It Is Time for the U.S. Senate to Join the 21st Century

By Zach Wamp

So while Senate candidates continue to file their campaign finance reports on paper and drag out what should be a simple process of disclosing their financial backers, all 435 members of the House of Representatives, political action committees and candidates for president live in the 21st century and file their campaign finance reports online…

To combat this, Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) have introduced the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act to fix the Senate’s purposefully antiquated “disclosure” practice. It would reveal who’s behind the last-minute surges of campaign contributions to Senate campaigns just before Election Day and key legislative votes. The only reason to continue to slow-walk these disclosures is to delay public awareness. It denies valuable transparency which has the potential to foster accountability by informing voters about who is aligned with and investing in their potential elected officials.

International Business Times: Republicans Keep Corporate Lobbying Secret By Adding Riders To Spending Bills

By Josh Keefe and David Sirota

As annual legislation to fund the government’s financial regulators comes before Congress this week, GOP legislators have buried a provision in the bill that would bar the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from considering a rule that would require companies to tell shareholders whether and how they are spending company money on politics. A separate provision would block federal officials from requiring government contractors to more fully disclose their political spending.

The language preventing those rulemaking efforts was originally passed as part of a 2015 spending bill. Without such rules, companies can keep shareholders in the dark about the vast amounts of company cash being funneled to politically active lobbying organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – which spent nearly $200 million on lobbying last election cycle and doesn’t disclose its donors or members. The rules would also apply to 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations, also called “dark money” groups, that air ads to influence U.S. elections but don’t have to disclose their donors.

Independent Groups

Washington Post: Is the most powerful lobbyist in Washington losing its grip?

By Steven Mufson

Companies like GE, which long relied on the Chamber to be their guide and advocate in Washington, are now as politically sophisticated and connected as the Chamber – if not more so. And in an era that allows virtually unlimited independent political spending, they can form their own more focused, and perhaps more effective, associations. Many lobbyists who represent companies individually think the Chamber has taken on the lumbering character of its aging building, a 92-year-old limestone edifice lined with Corinthian columns overlooking the White House.

“If there was a time in the past when they needed the Chamber for access to the White House, that’s kind of gone,” said a public affairs consultant who had worked with three Fortune 500 companies that have weighed leaving the Chamber. “Companies have the tools to create coalitions of like-minded firms on issues that are important to them.”

Wall Street Journal: Ethics for the D.C. Ethicists

By Kimberley A. Strassel

The OGE isn’t a watchdog or an inspector general’s office. As its own website makes clear, it doesn’t adjudicate complaints, investigate ethics violations, or prosecute misconduct. Rather, it was set up in 1978 to help the White House. Its job is to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions, a job undoubtedly more frustrating and messy under President Trump. Nonetheless, Mr. Shaub’s attempt to act as ethics czar, to ride herd on the Trump operation, is outside his office’s mission. It’s the act of a pious political operator who doesn’t like this president…

As for Mr. Shaub, he’s taking a job with the liberal Campaign Legal Center to push for greater OGE powers. No word on whether he negotiated that job even as the legal center was interacting with government, or whether he signed the Trump pledge barring officials from “lobbying” for five years after leaving government. (The OGE did not return a call for comment.) Maybe the ethics rules are different for ethics pooh-bahs.

Candidates and Campaigns

Just Security: What Trump Jr. Did Was Bad, But It Probably Didn’t Violate Federal Campaign Finance Law

By Daniel P. Tokaji

The disclosure of emails documenting Donald Trump, Jr.’s arrangement of a meeting with Natalia Veselnitskay has lots of people asking whether he or the Trump campaign violated federal campaign finance law. The pivotal question is whether they illegally solicited an in-kind contribution from a foreign national by attempting to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Russian national, including incriminating documents.

Although some outstanding lawyers contend otherwise, I don’t think federal campaign finance law prohibits what Trump Jr. did. If it did, then the Clinton campaign would also have broken the law had it sought information from non-U.S. nationals to investigate the claim that Trump Tower was built with undocumented workers. That interpretation of the law would raise very serious concerns concerning the free flow of political information.

The better view is that meeting with a foreign national to obtain information on a rival doesn’t generally violate federal campaign finance law, at least not without more. A different analysis should apply when items with a demonstrable monetary value are given or sought, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here given the vague description of the information offered to Trump Jr.

International Business Times: Donald Trump Jr. May Have Broken Campaign Finance Laws. Did Clinton Backers Do The Same?

By Alex Kotch

Defending Donald Trump Jr. against charges that he may have broken U.S. campaign finance law by meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 to obtain damaging info about Hillary Clinton, some Trump supporters and conservative media outlets have argued that Democrats have done the same. They cite an instance last year when a Democratic National Committee (DNC) consultant collaborated with Ukrainian Embassy staff on opposition research into Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort – research that the consultant may have shared with the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Based on the available public information, however, it remains unclear whether or not the consultant’s actions – and, by extension, those of the Clinton campaign – violated U.S. laws…

Trump Jr.’s apparent attempt to solicit opposition research from the Kremlin to help his father win the presidency may be more significant than a DNC consultant sharing dirt, possibly partially compiled by Ukrainian Embassy staff, on Trump’s campaign manager with the DNC or the Clinton campaign. But there is a real possibility that Chalupa, the DNC and the Clinton campaign may indeed have broken a campaign finance law.

The States

National Review: Should Landlords Be Forced to Subsidize Others’ Speech?

By Ethan Belvins

The city of Seattle has just embarked on an unprecedented experiment in campaign-finance reform that forces property owners, through a new property tax, to sponsor the campaign contributions of other city residents. The city attracted nationwide attention in 2015 when it passed the first “democracy voucher” program, which is just now under way. The Pacific Legal Foundation, representing two property owners subject to the tax, has sued the city, arguing that the First Amendment forbids the city from compelling property owners to fund viewpoints they oppose… 

This compelled subsidy for political donations violates the First Amendment. Freedom of speech embodies not only the right to speak, but also its corollary: the right not to speak. This includes the right to refrain from funding the speech of another person. After all, money talks, and when your money goes to promote a cause you don’t believe in, you’re the victim of political ventriloquism. The U.S. Supreme Court has called this a “bedrock principle” of the First Amendment – “that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.”

CT Post: Republicans torn over publicly-funded state elections

By Neil Vigdor

The top Republican contenders for governor find themselves at cross-purposes with lawmakers from their own party over publicly funded elections in 2018, with millions of dollars for their campaigns at stake in upcoming budget negotiations.

They have spent months trying to qualify for public funds under Connecticut’s clean-elections program, a slog that requires them to raise $250,000 from individuals in $100 increments or less. Some are more than half-way toward unlocking $1.4 million for the GOP primary and $6.5 million for the general election if they become the nominee. 

But GOP budget hawks want to cut the program to help close a $5 billion deficit, saying that the potential $40 million cost of subsidizing candidates up and down the ballot is too much and that there is a shortfall for the first time in the program’s history.

Urban Milwaukee: Democrats’ Bill Requires More Campaign Disclosure

By Wisconsin Democracy Campaign

Democratic legislators plan to introduce a bill that would require corporations and political committees to disclose money that they spend on advertising two months before an election.

Current law requires a committee that wishes to engage in certain campaign finance activities to register with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission and to report information about fundraising and spending on elections.

This bill requires a political action committee, an independent expenditure committee, and a recall committee to register if the committee spends money on print, broadcast or telephone mass communications that identify a candidate within 60 days of an election. The proposal also requires a person who is not a committee but who spends $500 or more on a mass communication to report that information within 24 hours. It is this latter clause that applies to corporations, as well, since they are considered to be “persons.”