A number of unhappy “good government” groups will file a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission next month, in hopes that the courts will force the FEC to enforce the federal campaign finance laws that the FEC is, supposedly, there to enforce.
The organizations are particularly unhappy about Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS “behemoth” outfit, which has raised hundreds of millions over the last several years to elect Republican candidates to office, recently receiving a pass from the FEC, even after the agency’s Office of General Counsel found reason to believe Rove’s group clearly violated campaign finance laws.
The news about the groups’ intention to file suit was offered on the KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast this week by my guest, Craig Holman, the Government Affairs Lobbyist for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. Public Citizen, along with the Campaign Legal Center, Center for Media and Democracy, and Protect Our Elections filed the initial complaint over campaign spending in 2010 by Rove’s then new non-profit 501(c)(4) organization. They now plan to sue the FEC for failing to do their job, Holman explained on the show on Wednesday. [Disclosure: Protect Our Elections is a campaign created by VelvetRevolution.us, an organization co-founded by The BRAD BLOG, though we weren’t personally involved with either the complaint or the upcoming suit.]
“What’s happened with the Federal Election Commission is,” Holman explained during my interview [posted in full at the end of this article], Senator “Mitch McConnell [R-KY], back in about 2008, realized that even though he can’t get Congress to rescind campaign finance laws — and he certainly can’t sell the public on rescinding campaign finance laws — he realized that if he were to appoint three Republican Commissioners to the FEC, he could ensure that the campaign finance laws don’t get enforced. And that’s exactly what has happened.” Holman detailed how three-to-three deadlock votes on whether to pursue further action in most of the campaign finance rulings by the three Democratic and three Republican Commissioners on the FEC has increased “nine-fold” since 2008. A deadlock vote effectively ends the matter, even if wrong-doing had been found by the investigative staff, as is the case here.
In the original complaint against Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the FEC’s Office of General Counsel (OGC) found that the group had spent a majority of its funding on campaigning in 2010. If so, that’s a violation of the law, since Rove’s group should have filed with the FEC as a political committee, rather than as a 501(c)(4) which is supposed to be a non-electioneering “social welfare” organization. As a political committee, funders would have to be immediately disclosed, but as a (c)(4), the identity of those funding Rove’s organization can remain a secret….
This is the “dark money” in elections that exploded after the Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United ruling, and this duplicity is precisely what the majority on the Court said could not happen, thanks to enforcement of existing campaign finance law by the FEC. That would be the same FEC which no longer seems able to enforce any law.
“Crossroads is the behemoth of electioneering non-profits groups, and the general counsel and the staff completely agreed with us,” Holman told me. “It’s a hand-down call. This is a political committee. Their major purpose is electing Republicans to Congress…or trying to defeat the election of Obama at the time as well.”
The tortured reasoning that the Republican Commissioners offered for voting against pursuing further investigation of Rove’s group, despite the findings of the OGC, was at the heart of my discussion with Holman. (For the record, here are the statements issued by the Democratic Commissioners [PDF] and by the Republican Commissioners [PDF] after the tie vote succeeded in quashing the entire matter.) And, of course, this abuse of the tax-payer funded 501(c)(4) system is precisely what was at the heart of the phony IRS “scandal” last year.
In short, citing the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, Holman explained: “We have a clear definition of federal election activity and the Republican Commissioners just decided not to use that definition. Instead, they created their own definition.”
The FEC “is broken,” he said. “So we need the courts to step in and start evaluating the merits of some of these cases, particularly the Crossroads GPS case.” That’s what Holman and the other groups now intend to do.
IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE SHOW…We covered the extraordinary “red-baiting” that happened over the weekend, as Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) were all shamefully given airtime by NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week and CBS’ Face the Nation to slime former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden as “a Russian agent”! Their evidence for these extraordinary claims? Absolutely none given, as David Gregory, George Stephanopoulos and Bob Schieffer allowed these top elected officials to simply smear Snowden with unsupported innuendo on all three network “news” outlets. Snowden, for his part, has since been forced to refute the charges in no uncertain terms to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. He calls the evidence-free charges “absurd”. We have the audio from the disgraceful Sunday “news” show performances, as well as the nearly identical smears offered by senior officials against Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg back in the 1970s.
PLUS: Details on the PA GOP’s polling place Photo ID restriction law being struck down as unconstitutional, breaking news on the new report by the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration and much more! Enjoy!
Download MP3 or listen online below…
The BradCast with Brad Friedman 1/23/2014KPFK ‘BradCast’: Lawsuit to Be Filed Against FEC After Republican Commissioners Ignore Findings of Illegal Electioneering by Rove’s Crossroads GPS | PLUS: Congress members given network air time to 'red-bait' Edward Snowden; Photo ID struck down in PA; MUCH MORE... · · · · · KPFK ‘BradCast’: Lawsuit to Be Filed Against FEC After Republican Commissioners Ignore Findings of Illegal Electioneering by Rove’s Crossroads GPS | PLUS: Congress members given network air time to 'red-bait' Edward Snowden; Photo ID struck down in PA; MUCH MORE...0:00 0:00
Heard the hit piece on Pete Aguilar, Mayor of Redlands, California YESTERDAY and some pretty slanderous accusations he had a mailer claiming his father had died, thus unavailable for debate last time around AND OTHER BS…………he had Redland’s City Council endorse Movement to Amend several years ago (pretty conservative council with 2 tea-baggers on it and 5th city in sw to do so), received endorsement from Wildland’s Conservancy (largest contribution of land to the fed gov in history, Catellus) of their plan to consolidate solar projects in least harmful fashion (as opposed to Bobby Kennedy’s Bright Source that has killed entire Kit Fox and Tortoise populations and broke Dave Galbaum’s ecological plan!); this is (to a lifetime KPFK contributor) pure bunk …please correct it oR I switch to NPR!!!!!!!!!!
Al Kelley said @ 1:
I’m sorry. Correct what? No clue what you’re actually referring to. Sorry about that.
Snowden is a lousy TRAITOR guilty of TREASON!
IF he exposes any of the “key files”, have U.S. agents leave Snowden hanging from a Russian lamppost, just to piss off that lunatic Greenwald, and Snowden Case Officer Vladimir Putin.
Geez, where did these nutjobs come from? Could they at least be coherent?
While I’ll leave it to Brad, I think the call by the anonymous poster going by Ed Snowedus @3 to “have U.S. agents leave Snowden hanging from a Russian lamppost” comes dangerously close to crossing the fine line between advocacy and incitement that we discussed in Should Major US Pundits, Politicians be Prosecuted for Incitement to Murder, ‘Terrorist Threats’?
It seems that something like that should be treated as a violation of this site’s rules for comments, at the very least, and deleted.
Interesting reference to Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Brad. The target of the smears may have changed but the tactic is the same.
That idiot Ed Snowedus has it backwards, Vladimir is the one to be condemned then indicted by a World Court for his massive support of this Century’s Hitler, Bashar Assad.
Cargo planes are streaming to Syria with armaments as the packed ships take too long.
11,423 children (0-17) killed by Assad’s forces through August, some deliberately, 1% tortured first. Massive evidence of systematic state torture, with 11,000 tormented and starved prisoners then killed and photographed. The UN has condemned Syria for widespread torture going back 33 months.
“Ed Snowedus” @ 3 said:
Thanks for letting us know you haven’t read the Constitution and, thus, have no clue what “TREASON” is. Don’t worry, those of us who give a damn about the Constitution, like Snowden and The BRAD BLOG, will help protect it (and you along with it), even if you remain clueless about it.
You’re welcome! And have a great day!
Yesterday I went to a lunchtime talk at Harvard Law School by Prof. Cass Sunstein. Prof. Sunstein was a member of President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which recently issued a report ( http://tinyurl.com/lj4azsg ) entitled “Liberty and Security in a Changing World”, evaluating at least some of the activities of the NSA and recommending changes, some of which are welcome to those of us who remember the Fourth Amendment fondly. His talk was mostly about the report.
The questions afterward were the most interesting part to me. The very last question came from my friend Saul Tannenbaum, who is an occasional commenter at Marcy Wheeler’s site, among other places. Saul is a retired IT guy for a local university, so he understands how these things work a lot better than I do. The gist of his question was whether the review group ever asked about the full scope of the NSA’s collection activities, rather than what the report seemed to indicate, which was investigation only of activities conducted under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (see http://tinyurl.com/pka8oaj for the EFF’s explanation of these two provisions). Not surprisingly, Prof. Sunstein sidestepped the question and did not answer it.
Saul and I talked for awhile afterwards, and he told me about a newish company in Kendall Square (The Most Innovative Square Mile on Earth(TM)). Sqrrl was formed by former NSA engineers who helped develop the software the NSA uses to store and search their enormous accumulations of data. That software is open source, and Sqrrl aims to commercialize it. You can read Saul’s article on it at http://cctvcambridge.org/sqrrl.