The FEC has received 59 complaints that Donald Trump or his committees have violated campaign finance laws, Citizens for Responsibility And Ethics in Washington (CREW) has reported. The nonpartisan Office of the General Counsel recommended that 29 of those complaints be investigated. But Republicans have blocked each attempt.
CREW explains how this happened:
Because at least four of the six FEC Commissioners need to approve any FEC investigation, and because only three of those seats can be filled by Democrats, Republicans hold a veto over the agency’s enforcement and have repeatedly used it to shoot down any recommended enforcement of campaign finance law against Trump—and thus successfully shielded him from accountability over and over. Instead of fostering bipartisanship, the split FEC has often become gridlocked and, in cases involving Trump, its ability to pursue action is constrained by the members of one party.
And look who helped Trump escape accountability via a ruling made one month before he was nominated to the Supreme Court!
The FEC’s enabling statute, the Federal Election Campaign Act, specifically subjects the Commission’s non-enforcement to review to prevent it from blocking meritorious enforcement. In June 2018, however, two Republican-appointed judges of the D.C. Circuit—including now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—largely gutted that rule, giving commissioners the authority to block enforcement of the law without judicial review if the commissioners claimed that they did so as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion or under Heckler v. Chaney.
According to CREW, Republicans used that ruling to block investigations of 21 of the 29 complaints. They used different excuses to block the other 8.
I recently reported that another Trump plan to cheat his way back into the White House is via an RNC vote-rigging scheme. We’ve also seen how his cronies on the Supreme Court and Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon are helping him evade accountability in our criminal justice system.
In short, we have only ourselves to rely on to make sure this corrupt Hitler-admirer and sexual predator never gets back into the White House.
