Campaign finance experts weigh in regarding Sanders’ campaign’s inquiries regarding Clinton’s fundraising arrangement with the DNC.
While they find Clinton’s activities unethical, they are likely not illegal.
“This is the type of mega, mega joint fundraising committee that we all feared would come into existence if McCutcheon were ruled the wrong way, which it was,” said Craig Holman with Public Citizen. “It makes maximum use of the loose rules governing joint fundraising. They’re using big checks to set up a small donor fundraising campaign and turning over the small donors to the Hillary campaign while keeping the large ones for the party. It is permissible, but it’s offensive, and it should be illegal.”
Craig Holman
Public Citizen
“It shows the DNC has clearly taken sides before they even have a nominee,” said Holman. “There’s an obvious bias.”
“They really are throwing their weight behind a particular candidate,” he said. “Their argument is usually that it helps the party generally, but the practical and legal reality is that it benefits Hillary Clinton. You just don’t expect this kind of thing to happen in the primaries.”
Larry Noble
Campaign Legal Center
Noble added that even if there were a legal violation in Clinton’s fundraising — for example, exceeding limits for in-kind donations from the DNC to her campaign — the gridlocked Federal Elections Commissions will not do anything to put a stop to it.
“The FEC is not known to be a functional agency anymore and we’re seeing the effect of that,” he said. “People are pushing the envelope further and further, until it shreds.”
So now we know why there was not a complaint filed with the FEC: first, because of McCutcheon, which further deregulated campaign finance in the wake of Citizens United, this sort of behavior is legal, even if it is unethical, and second, because the FEC is basically toothless.
McCutcheon reversed a lower court ruling that held that:
"The government may justify the aggregate limits [of campaign contributions] as a means of preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption, or as a means of preventing circumvention of contribution limits imposed to further its anticorruption interest."
And thus, when scholars like Rick Hasen say that Sanders’ complaint is “legally . . . weak”, that just means that because of terrible finance laws, the unethical has become legal, so were it to be adjudicated it would likely to be found to be legal.
Holman and Noble don’t say anything about the DNC paying for Clinton staff salaries, so we don’t know if that is illegal or merely “offensive.”
Is that the standard we use now? Unethical, offensive, biased and unfair, but legal, so let’s go for it? I mean, why bother “preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption”?
I used to think Democrats were better than that.