HuffPost Politics / Center for Public Integrity: Two Very Different Donalds, One White House Goal
A force? Yes. A positive force? No, says former FEC general counsel Lawrence M. Noble, who is now general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that was often at odds with McGahn.
“His impact on the agency was to continue moving the agency down the road to where it is today, which is a non-enforcement agency,” Noble said, adding that McGahn was continually questioning “long-standing interpretations of the law and saying he would not go along with it.”
During McGahn’s tenure at the FEC, he was a frequent target for watchdog groups who said he was crippling the FEC’s ability to enforce the law and destroying morale among the agency’s staff through his reluctance to proceed with enforcement cases. Noble once described him as a commissioner who “did his best to make the FEC dysfunctional.”