As if disgraced former President Donald Trump wasn’t buried in enough lawsuits, investigations, and scandals as it were, a bombshell new report from The Daily Beasts’ Roger Sollenberger has revealed that the shame-ridden, one-term, twice-impeached ex-president is now embroiled in yet another nasty scandal as well as a potential mountain of massive fines hailing from the Federal Election Commission over an alleged violation of federal campaign finance laws regarding the mishandling of over $800 million in campaign donations.
It seems the center of the controversy lies in the way Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign allegedly shuffled and flopped money around while he was desperately trying to remain in office following his brutal loss to Joe Biden.
Sollenberger notes in his report that the campaign of former First Lady, Secretary of State, and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate opposing Donald Trump Hillary Clinton was recently fined by the FEC in the amount of $113,000 in connection to its involvement in research for the so-called Steele dossier. The US federal government alleges that Clinton’s campaign his those payments, leading to the fines.
On the heels of the minor Clinton scandal, Sollenberger reports for The Beast that the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center had previously filed a complaint against Trump’s people, with the FEC, alleging that the former president’s circle “violated federal campaign finance transparency requirements by routing hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending through intermediaries without disclosing the ultimate payees.” Now, one former FEC official has asked a judge to force the entity to investigate the bombshell allegations.
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The publication reports that the FEC — “specifically its three Republican commissioners” — have willingly and knowingly turned a blind eye to the accusations against Trump and his campaign, but with the recent Clinton fines serving as a glaring reminder, it may serve as the catalyst to changing their mind.
“Dan Weiner, a former counsel at the FEC who now directs the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, said the Republican commissioners will have to contend with this precedent,” Sollenberger wrote for The Beast. Weiner explains, “The FEC isn’t exactly overzealous about enforcement, but you’ve got to have some modicum of accuracy. You can’t describe something as ‘legal services’ when it’s nothing like legal services.”
He went on to refer to the Clinton fine as “an interesting precedent,” before going on to add “Historically both sides have placed some emphasis on consistency, and it will put some constraint on the commissioners to reconcile any refusal to go forwards in the Trump case.”
“While it’s inescapable that the three Republican commissioners are far more averse to action than the Democrats, there’s debate over whether the rift is political or purely ideological. The conservatives may not specifically be in the bag for their own party, some observers argue—just less inclined to enforcement generally,” the publication reports. “The filing alleges that the Trump campaign laundered about $770 million in expenses to an unknown number of vendors through a single shell company. According to news reports, that company—American Made Media Consultants—was designed by members of Trump’s inner circle (with Trump’s blessing) specifically to conceal campaign payees from the public.’Like the Clinton complaint, CLC said the Trump arrangement “has hidden the identities of other sub-vendors’ and the details of payments to those sub-vendors.”
“CLC filed that initial complaint more than 600 days ago, but, according to Adav Noti, a former FEC attorney and current vice president at CLC, there has been ‘no indication’ that the FEC has taken any action. So purely by coincidence, the same day that the Clinton news leaked to the press, Noti filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to order the FEC to move,” Sollenberger reports for The Daily Beast before adding that Noti told him, “The law requires campaigns to disclose where they spend money and what they spend it on, because voters deserve to know where their money goes. But there’s a growing problem in federal political campaigns of running spending through shell corporations to hide where it’s going. We’ve seen it now in multiple election cycles, and campaigns for all federal offices.”
You can read the full, bombshell report from The Daily Beast right here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
