It’s mentally exhausting to watch former President Donald Trump and his family members appear to get away with all of their misdeeds. Once again, it’s happening with Donald Trump Jr. Axios reports that the Federal Election Commission, in a 3-3 vote, decided “not to investigate allegations that Trump campaign representatives — including Donald Trump Jr. — solicited illegal foreign assistance in 2016.” The investigation involves Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort allegedly illegally soliciting foreign assistance during a Trump Tower meeting with Russian envoys in June 2016. Former President Donald Trump pardoned Manafort in late December last year.
This is outrageous after the FEC recently closed the file on another 2016 campaign matter: former President Trump’s hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. And in this more recent decision, the Trump campaign was trying to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton.
While an FEC spokesperson declined to comment to the outlet on the Trump Tower matter, Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, one of the groups behind the complaint, told Axios that his organization had been notified that the case file had been closed.
“There was nothing surprising about the notification,” Wertheimer told the outlet. “Everyone in the system knows that the FEC will not enforce the law because the Republican commissioners do not want to enforce the law.”
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The Republicans’ reasoning behind their votes doesn’t sound logical.
A source with direct knowledge of the matter told Axios that the three Republican commissioners voted against finding “reason to believe” a violation occurred in the case.
Their reasoning, the source said, was largely procedural: the five-year statute of limitations for the law at issue expires in just a few months, and they argued there now isn’t enough time left to sufficiently adjudicate the matter.
That sounds like an excuse to me since the “few months” aren’t up yet. It also sounds like the same excuse some Republicans offered for declining to convict the former president, saying that he was out of office, when in fact, he was in office when he incited the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection. And Trump was in office when he was impeached. I’m starting to see a pattern here.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
