Campaign Legal Center (CLC) obtained a new ethics memo from the Environmental Protection Agency with additional insight on how Administrator Scott Pruitt identified what he considered to be comparable rentals.

“Putting aside the gift regulations, it is hard to understand why Pruitt thought it was a good idea to rent a condo owned by a campaign contributor who is a lobbyist,” said Walter Shaub, senior director, ethics, at CLC. “The ethics opinion was based on the assumption that Pruitt was leasing only one room. If it turns out Pruitt's daughter was allowed to stay in the other room, he had both rooms in the residence. There’s a big difference in what you’d pay to stay in a house with strangers and what you’d pay to have a place to yourself. The ethics official told me he did not speak with Pruitt before writing his opinion, so the ethics official could not have known for certain whether Pruitt actually used only one of the bedrooms or both. In the new memorandum, the ethics official also provides additional information about how he assessed market rate, which people can now review for themselves and decide whether they agree with that assessment.”

Today, CLC and Issue One called on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to enforce penalties against Americans for Job Security — one of the top spenders of political “dark money” in recent years — for failing to file three years’ worth of mandatory tax returns. For this, Americans for Job Security could be punished with the loss of its tax-exempt status as well as monetary fines.

A tax-exempt business league under Section 501(c)(6) of the tax code, Americans for Job Security has spent more than $20 million on political ads that overtly called for the election or defeat of federal candidates since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010.

“There must be meaningful consequences for groups that attempt to leave the public in the dark," said Brendan Fischer, director, federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center. "Americans for Job Security has long deprived the public of information about the sources of its funding as it spent tens of millions of dollars influencing elections, and for the past three years, it has been evading the minimal transparency requirements associated with its tax-exempt status.”

For its part, Americans for Job Security has not filed a mandatory tax return since September 15, 2015 — a filing that detailed the organization’s receipts and expenditures between November 1, 2013, through October 31, 2014, along with other information.

This means that Americans for Job Security’s tax return for its fiscal year that ended October 31, 2015, is currently at least 566 days late. Its tax return for its fiscal year that ended October 31, 2016, is currently at least 201 days late. And three weeks ago, Americans for Job Security appears to have missed the deadline for filing its tax return for its fiscal year that ended October 31, 2017.

The Internal Revenue Code clearly states that organizations that do not file a tax return for three consecutive years will automatically lose their tax-exempt status. Americans for Job Security could also be fined thousands of dollars — if not tens of thousands of dollars — by the IRS.

Founded in 1997, Americans for Job Security was among the earliest political “dark money” groups — so-called because they do not publicly disclose their donors, unlike political action committees, super PACs, candidates and parties, which do.

In July 2016, the Federal Election Commission fined Americans for Job Security $43,000 after the agency concluded that the group should have disclosed a nonprofit known as the Center to Protect Patient Rights, then associated with the political network of billionaires Charles and David Koch, as a donor behind some of its political expenditures in 2010.

In addition to its own political spending, Americans for Job Security also played a prominent role in funneling tens of millions of dollars to two ballot measure fights in California during the 2012 election — part of a scheme that the California Fair Political Practices Commission later concluded was designed to hide the identities of the actual donors supporting the ballot measure efforts.

The new complaint from Issue One and the Campaign Legal Center is available online here.

WASHINGTON – Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that the John Bolton Super PAC’s work with Cambridge Analytica resulted in unlawful coordinated communications during the 2014 election cycle. 

In the 2014 elections, Cambridge Analytica provided services to the John Bolton Super PAC, the North Carolina Republican Party, and Thom Tillis’ campaign. Although Cambridge Analytica is supposed to separate its work for campaigns from its work for super PACs, evidence indicates that this didn’t happen—and that Cambridge Analytica acted as a conduit to funnel strategic information to the John Bolton Super PAC – which then spent $1.4 million on ads supporting Tillis’ U.S. Senate candidacy.

As a result, the John Bolton Super PAC made excessive and unreported contributions, in violation of the reporting requirements and contribution limits required by law, and in violation of its status as an independent expenditure-only super PAC.

“It is important that the FEC investigate this violation and enforce the law so that the voices of everyday voters are not drowned out by billionaires,” said Brendan Fischer, director, federal and FEC reform program at CLC. “This apparent violation fits into a pattern where the use of Cambridge Analytica as a vendor seems to be a condition of billionaire megadonor Robert Mercer’s support of a candidate. Cambridge Analytica has been used in both the U.S. and U.K. to unlawfully coordinate political entities in order to evade campaign finance limits.”

Cambridge Analytica’s primary owner, Mercer, was also the John Bolton Super PAC’s single largest funder. Details in the complaint show how the John Bolton super PAC unlawfully used strategic information that Cambridge Analytica derived from its work for the party or campaign to develop advertisements expressly advocating for Tillis’ election. Among other things, a Cambridge Analytica employee boasted on his online portfolio about the company’s role in “helping Thom Tillis' successful senatorial campaign create highly targeted advertising,” and as a sample of that work, posted a John Bolton Super PAC video ad expressly advocating for Tillis’ election. After a reporter asked questions about this, the employee altered the page.

WASHINGTON – Last night, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross directed the U.S. Census Bureau to add a question about citizenship to the Census. This question is untested and intrusive, and will raise concerns in households about the confidentiality of their personal information. It will undermine the Census’ central purpose of conducting an accurate enumeration. Immigrant communities, documented and undocumented, that fear being targeted by the administration will be undercounted.

“The decision to add a citizenship question is purely political, and could have a destructive effect on the accuracy of the data we rely on to structure our democracy,” said Danielle Lang, senior legal counsel, voting rights and redistricting, at Campaign Legal Center (CLC). “It is the Census Bureau’s constitutional responsibility to conduct a fair and accurate count of every person living in the United States. Americans deserve fair representation based on accurate Census data, but this will not happen if the Census is marred by significant undercounting.”

There has been bipartisan opposition to the Justice Department’s request for the question, including 60 members of Congress, 161 Democratic and Republican mayors, six former census directors who served in Republican and Democratic administrations and 19 attorneys general.

CLC filed two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Justice and U.S. Census Bureau seeking more information on how the Census Bureau arrived at its decision to act on DOJ’s recommendation. The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ has refused to provide any information about how it reached the decision to make this request.

Additionally, on January 18, CLC signed a letter to Secretary Ross expressing legal concerns about the leadership of the Census Bureau.

WASHINGTON – Today, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that Remember Mississippi, a super PAC funded by national GOP megadonors Robert Mercer and Richard Uihlein, illegally made contributions to Mississippi U.S. Senate candidate Chris McDaniel. Among other things, the Remember Mississippi super PAC, which was formed by McDaniel’s assistant, took the unprecedented step of organizing, funding and advertising three McDaniel campaign events, which included speeches expressly advocating for McDaniel’s election in front of a “McDaniel U.S. Senate 2018” backdrop.

“We’ve never seen a super PAC take the brazen step of organizing and funding straight up campaign events for the candidate they are supporting,” said Brendan Fischer, director, federal and FEC reform at CLC. “Thanks to the FEC’s ineffective enforcement of the law, super PACs and campaigns have increasingly found ways to work closely with one another, but it appears this Mercer-backed super PAC went too far. If it wants candidates to take campaign laws seriously, the FEC must investigate and punish violators for wrongdoing.”

The super PAC paid for McDaniel campaign events, advertised for them, and promoted his candidacy at them. McDaniel’s personal assistant at his law firm, Susan Perkins, organized the group and became its treasurer, while also managing the McDaniels’ campaign Facebook page.

“Super PACs are categorically prohibited from making contributions to candidates,” said Adav Noti, senior director, trial litigation at CLC, and former associate general counsel for policy at the FEC. “The FEC should strip Remember Mississippi of its status as a super PAC, which appears to have been obtained under false pretenses, and impose major fines to deter others from violating this bright-line rule in the future."

Remember Mississippi received $1 million from Mercer and Uihlein. McDaniel acknowledged publicly his relationship to the super PAC’s financiers, saying “the Mercers and other donors have pledged more than $1 million” to support his candidacy, and emphasized that “I’ve known the Mercers since 2013, and we’ve talked a good deal about 2018.”