FEC must investigate this matter so future campaigns don’t feel empowered to ignore reporting requirements necessary for transparency

In televised interviews on Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for President Trump, asserted that Trump reimbursed Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen for the $130,000 payment to silence Stormy Daniels about their alleged affair, just days before the 2016 presidential election. President Trump thereafter tweeted confirming that he made the reimbursement.

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) President Trevor Potter released the following statement:

“Trump’s admission that he later repaid Cohen for the hush money destroys any argument Cohen could have made that the payment was out of his own money as an independent expenditure. Instead, Cohen and the Trump campaign now have to argue that the payment reimbursed by the candidate was not 'in connection with the election,' and therefore was not an excessive in-kind contribution by Cohen (when made and for the months prior to his being reimbursed). They have to make the same claim to defend against the charge that the campaign violated the law by failing to report these transactions on its Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports. Those arguments are much harder to make after Giuliani’s statement that the payment prevented news of the affair emerging before the Clinton-Trump debates, since that is an admission that the confidentiality agreement and the timing of the payment influenced the 2016 elections.

Given the new accounts by Trump and Giuliani, it now appears Cohen violated campaign finance law when he fronted the $130,000 payment with funds financed by his home mortgage because that constitutes a campaign contribution by him well in excess of the $2,700 limit, and the Trump campaign (through its agent, the candidate) violated the law by accepting an excessive contribution and failing to report it. If this is the case, then the campaign further violated the law by failing to report Trump’s subsequent repayments to Cohen.

This is a reminder of why disclosure and reporting laws are on the books in the first place: if these transactions were properly reported by the Trump campaign in October 2016, it would have triggered public attention to the issue, and would have given voters relevant information that could be factored into their decision-making.

It is important for the FEC to take this matter seriously and open an investigation, so future campaigns don’t feel empowered to ignore requirements put in place to keep campaigns transparent about who is funding campaigns and how campaigns are spending money.

With this latest explanation, President Trump finds himself between something of a rock and a hard place. If this payment was a $460,000 loan from Michael Cohen, as Rudy Giuliani claimed, Trump was required to disclose it in the financial disclosure report that he filed in June 2017 with the Office of Government Ethics. The law required him to disclose any loan that was greater than $10,000 at any time during 2016 or the first half of 2017. He didn’t disclose it and, if the omission was intentional, he could be subject to civil or criminal penalties.”

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit released a decision on Veasey v. Abbott, a legal challenge to Texas’ voter ID law. Campaign Legal Center (CLC) represents a group of plaintiffs who have challenged the law as burdening the fundamental right to vote.

Danielle Lang, senior legal counsel, voting rights and redistricting, at CLC, released the following statement in reaction:

“While we are disappointed by the outcome today, we must not lose sight of how far we have come in the fight for Texas voters. Because of our brave clients and this litigation, voters statewide can never be turned away from the polls simply for lacking a certain type of photo ID. After years of fighting this discriminatory voter ID law in the courts, the Fifth Circuit en banc court found that the original voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act, and so Texas could not enforce it. With respect to the revised law, we are exploring all legal options. We will also work with our partners to ensure that voters are well-educated about their options and not deterred from exercising their right to vote by any confusion around the photo ID rules. ”

WASHINGTON – Plaintiffs in North Carolina’s partisan gerrymandering challenge, League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho, filed a motion with the U.S. Supreme Court today asking the court to affirm the lower court’s ruling that found the entire state’s plan to be an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. In February, the Supreme Court denied expedited briefing in the case, but it still has the ability to affirm the district court’s decision and order fair maps to be drawn in the state soon thereafter.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), and University of Chicago Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos represent plaintiffs in the case. They jointly filed the brief on behalf of their clients, the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and 12 individual North Carolina voters.   

“The district court unanimously and correctly found that North Carolina lawmakers manipulated the state’s congressional voting maps to lock in their own political party’s power, with little regard for the will of voters,” said Paul Smith, vice president at CLC, who argued CLC’s landmark partisan gerrymandering case out of Wisconsin, Gill v. Whitford, before the Supreme Court on October 3. “North Carolina has one of the most severely gerrymandered maps in modern American history. North Carolina voters have endured three election cycles with a skewed congressional map. The Supreme Court must affirm the lower court’s ruling, because even a single election under an unconstitutional map is one too many.”

"The congressional maps drawn in North Carolina would be unconstitutional under virtually any meaningful legal standard the court adopts," said Allison Riggs, senior voting rights attorney for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. "We are hopeful that the court will recognize the glaring unconstitutionality of the plan and affirm the lower court's ruling.

Evidence presented at trial in 2017 demonstrated that the Republican plan to use political data in drawing this map to gain partisan advantage worked exactly as expected. In the 2016 election, Republican congressional candidates in North Carolina won ten out of thirteen seats, even though the statewide vote was nearly tied and North Carolina is a purple state. An expert that examined the map determined that the North Carolina plan exhibited the largest partisan bias of any congressional map in the country.

This term, the Supreme Court will decide CLC’s case challenging Wisconsin’s state assembly map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. CLC and co-counsel represent 11 Wisconsin voters in the landmark case, Gill v. Whitford. The federal district court in North Carolina applied the same tests for measuring partisan symmetry as were applied in the Wisconsin case, indicating that there is a manageable way to consistently measure what constitutes an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander

Read more about the case League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho.

WASHINGTON – Today, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) announced that the agency will begin reviewing campaign disclosure reports to determine whether former candidates and officeholders are illegally using leftover campaign money for personal purposes, after Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a petition for rulemaking on Feb. 5, 2018. A bombshell investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and WTSP revealed how common it is for former officeholders to continue using campaign funds long after candidates left office, stopped campaigning, or died, on expenses like country club dues, expensive flights and hotels, and cell phone bills.

“We applaud the FEC for taking action to crack down on the ‘zombie campaign’ phenomenon,” said Adav Noti, senior director, trial litigation at CLC and former associate general counsel for policy at the FEC. “It is not in the public interest for campaign accounts to turn into personal slush funds for former candidates. While enforcing the existing rules on the use of campaign funds is a big step in the right direction, the FEC will also need to clarify and strengthen those rules to properly address this widespread problem.”

Today’s announcement from the FEC commits the FEC to ensuring that campaign funds are only used to support one’s candidacy and duties as an officeholder. That means that once a person is no longer a candidate or officeholder, the allowable uses of campaign funds become more limited.

CLC has brought this issue to the attention of the FEC with the rulemaking petition as well as two legal complaints in the past year pointing to egregious examples of former lawmakers or their campaign staff converting funds to personal use.

• October 2017: Retired Congressman Cliff Stearns still has an active campaign account despite leaving office in 2013. CLC filed a complaint because Stearns was using apparently illegal campaign expenditures to pay for his monthly cellphone bill, payments to his wife, membership dues at private Washington D.C. clubs, and expenses apparently related to his private sector lobbying career.
• January 2018: CLC filed a complaint concerning the treasurer of the late-Congressman Mark Takai’s campaign committee, who paid himself more than $100,000 after Takai’s passing to “consult” the campaign.
• February 2018: CLC files a rulemaking petition asking the FEC to revise and amend regulations pertaining to the personal use of campaign funds as they apply to former candidates and officeholders.
• March 2018: the FEC published a notice of availability in the Federal Register regarding CLC’s rulemaking petition.