Weintraub, Ellen fec

FIRED ILLEGALLY BY TRUMP

NOTE SCOTUS 6 26 PREZ CAN FIRE INDEP AGY EG SLAUGHTER, THIS CAN CORRUPT OR PARALYZE AGENCY BY NO QUORUM

OFFICIAL Leadership and structure - FEC.gov

4 VANCANCIES, NO NOMS OR TIMELINE 7 26

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Supreme Court strikes down limits on party spending in federal elections, backing Republican appeal | The Associated Press

(AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday erased limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and president, striking down a federal election law that is more than 50 years old.

Prodded by a Republican-led lawsuit that includes Vice President JD Vance, the court’s six conservative justices were again in the majority of the latest decision that upended congressionally enacted limits on raising and spending money to influence elections. The court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the door to unlimited independent spending in federal elections.

The limits on party spending stem from a desire to prevent large donors from skirting caps on individual contributions to a candidate by directing unlimited sums to the party, with the understanding that the money will be spent on behalf of the candidate.

The Supreme Court had previously upheld the limits, in 2001.

But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the court, said that decision was wrong and should be overruled. “In short, constitutional text, history and precedent establish that the political-party coordinated-expenditure limits violate the First Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent for the three liberal justices said the court “ushers in untold harm” by enabling parties to funnel large contributions to individual candidates, far in excess of what donors can give those candidates directly.

National parties now will be able to make direct contributions to candidates’ campaigns,

The decision is likely to give Republicans at least a short-term boost because they maintain a sizable cash advantage over Democrats.

The Republican National Committee and its Senate and House campaign fundraising arms have dwarfed Democrats’ in the months before congressional elections where the GOP is defending narrow majorities in both houses.

At the end of May, the RNC reported having more than $125 million to spend, its highest-ever cash on hand total, according to its most recent Federal Election Commission filing in May. Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had more than $48 million on hand in its most recent report and the National Republican Congressional Committee had more than $81 million.

In the same period, the Democratic National Committee had $14.4 million on hand, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had roughly $37 million and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, roughly $73 million.

The Republican committees for House and Senate candidates filed the lawsuit in Ohio in 2022, joined by Vance, then a senator from Ohio, and then-Rep. Steve Chabot.

After President Donald Trump took office for his second term, the Federal Election Commission dropped its defense of the law and joined with Republicans in urging that it be overturned.

Democrats had called on the court to uphold the law, even though there is wide agreement that the spending limits have hurt political parties in an era of unlimited spending by other organizations.

Last year, the coordinated party spending for Senate races ranged from $127,200 in several states with small populations to nearly $4 million in California, the most populous state. For House races, the limits were $127,200 in states with only one representative and $63,600 everywhere else.

Entrenched divisions between liberal and conservative justices over campaign finance restrictions were on display when the court heard arguments in December.

“Every time we interfere with the congressional design, we make matters worse,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a dissenter in Citizens United and the court’s other campaign money cases.

By contrast, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the Citizens United majority, described the decision as “much maligned, I think unfairly maligned.” The effect of the decision was to ”level the playing field,” Alito said, by expanding the right to spend freely that had previously belonged only to media companies.

Associated Press writer Thomas Beaumont contributed to this report.

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7 25

The Federal Election Commission officially has a new chair.

Democrat Shana Broussard, who was nominated to the commission in 2020 by President Donald Trump, formally became FEC chair on Tuesday, two months after her fellow commissioners elected her to the position. It’s Broussard’s second time in the role; she previously chaired the commission in 2021.

Broussard is the first permanent chair at the FEC since February, when Trump abruptly removed longtime commissioner and then-Chair Ellen Weintraub from the agency. Since then, Republican Commissioner Trey Trainor has served as the commission’s acting chair.

Broussard is beginning her tenure as chair at a particularly difficult moment for the FEC. The six-person commission has seen its membership cut in half since the beginning of the year.

Republican former Commissioner Sean Cooksey resigned in January to take a job in Vice President JD Vance’s office and Trump ousted Weintraub a month later. Republican now-former Commissioner Allen Dickerson then resigned from the agency in April – on the same day Broussard was elected chair – when his term in office expired.

The resignations and Weintraub’s firing has left the FEC one commissioner shy of the four-member quorum it needs to hold meetings, issue advisory opinions and take enforcement actions. Trump has yet to nominate replacements for any of the vacancies, and it’s unclear when he might do so. Even then, any nominee would have to be confirmed by the Senate before taking office.

Despite its lack of a quorum, the agency has continued to collect, process and post campaign finance disclosure and transaction information.

A ‘Challenging Time’ for the FEC

In a statement on Tuesday, Broussard acknowledged that it is a “challenging time” for the FEC, but insisted that she is prepared to tackle the growing backlog of campaign finance enforcement matters once the commission’s quorum is restored.

According to Broussard, there were 161 pending enforcement matters before the FEC as of April – far fewer than the 452 on the docket in 2021, when Broussard first became chair.

“As money in federal elections increases, so does our agency’s responsiveness,” Broussard said. “The 2024 election cycle set numerous records, both in terms of the money raised and spent on federal elections and the amount of financial activity reported to the Commission. Our disclosure work has not stopped: during the first quarter of 2025, over 3,000 committees reported transactions totaling over $700 million of financial activity.”

“I am ready to tackle any backlogged matters if a quorum is restored before the end of this year,” she added.

No Timeline for Filling Vacancies

Trump has yet to name nominees for any of the three vacancies at the FEC, and the White House hasn’t offered a timeline for when he might do so. A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to C&E’s request for comment on Wednesday.

Still, the Trump administration has shown little interest in enforcing campaign finance laws and has, in fact, signaled that certain regulations should be tossed out.

The Justice Department notified the Supreme Court last month that it would not defend current restrictions on coordinated party spending in a case that the high court is expected to hear later this year.

Likewise, the FEC – at the direction of the Trump administration – has said that it agrees with the plaintiffs in that case, which argues that the existing limits on how much party committees can spend in coordination with federal candidates violates First Amendment free speech rights.

The Democratic National Committee and its associated groups have said that they will defend the current law before the court.

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“As of Today, the FEC Can’t Enforce Campaign Finance Laws — and That’s Only One of Its Problems”

:{:{[May 1, 2025,}:

federal election commission Rick Hasen}:

Dan Weinerfor the Brennan Center:

Starting today, the bipartisan Federal Election Commission won’t be able to do its job. That’s because the independent agency, which oversees money in campaigns for federal office, will no longer have the minimum four required members to do most business.

The loss of quorum is due to the resignation of a Republican appointee, coupled with President Trump’s unprecedented move in February to fire a Democratic appointee. Such a shortfall has only happened three other times in the FEC’s 50-year history, including twice during Trump’s first term.

Ordinarily, the big question would be how fast the president and Congress will move to restore a full complement of commissioners so the agency can function. That is still important. But in light of the firing and the president’s other steps to exert control over the FEC and other independent agencies, there is now a much bigger issue: Will the FEC be able to continue as an independent watchdog at all? Because even worse than a dormant FEC is one that could be weaponized against the president’s opponents….

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/facebook-pro-trump-groups/

salon no twt

Reporting on Friday revealed that Facebook knowingly allowed a digital marketing firm tied to a pro-Trump group to release a series of ads purporting to be from a fake left-wing organization ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, while election officials failed to investigate the group at the time.

As The Guardian reported, a right-wing marketing firm called Rally Forge ran a $5,000 ad campaign beginning just days before the2018 election, showing ads promoting Green Party candidates in an effort to split the Democratic vote and help Republicans in several close races. The ads were purported to be placed by a group called America Progress Now and expressed support for democratic socialism.

Facebook launched an investigation into the ads just after the election and quickly determined that America Progress Now's official page on the platform was run by the same three men—Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg, and Colton Duncan—who were administrators for Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump college organization.

To the alarm of a number of Facebook employees, The Guardian reported, the company did not find Rally Forge or Turning Point USA to be in violation of any of its policies.

One product manager at the time said a case could be made for Rally Forge and Turning Point USA having engaged in voter suppression through the ads, and asked, "Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?"

After the election, Facebook deactivated several other right-wing accounts run by the administrators, but the move did not stop Rally Forge from establishing a "troll farm" out of Phoenix, Arizona in 2020. Working for Turning Point Action, a group linked to Turning Point USA, the firm hired teenagers to post pro-Trump messages on social media, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the election system.

Sophie Zhang, aformer Facebook employee who participated in the investigation of the fake Green Party ads, wrote on Twitter Friday, "One wonders if [Rally Forge] would have escalated to troll farms, had FB deterred them in 2018." twt]

"This is egregious," tweeted the women's rights group UltraViolet on Friday.

Beyond Facebook's decision to allow the firm to remain on Facebook after determining the ads were fraudulent, the ads "appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the [Federal Election Commission] and include proper disclosures on advertisements," The Guardian reported.

"This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw 'America Progress Now' ads promoting Green party candidates would've had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives," Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, told The Guardian.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the FEC in 2019 over America Progress Now and the administrators' failure to disclose the true source of the Facebook ads, only to have the case dismissed before the FEC could conduct an investigation.

The election commissioners declined to look further into the complaint after a man named Evan Muhlstein contacted them to take full responsibility to the ads, claiming he alone had failed to file the ad expenditures with the FEC and saying his "inexperience" was to blame.

"The FEC's job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters' right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation," Fischer said.

According to former FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel, who served on the commission from 2013 to 2017, Muhlstein's admission to the FEC appeared to amount to "clear fraud," as he never disclosed to the officials that the ads had been the work of Rally Forge.

At the time, though, Muhlstein's claim was enough to convince at least one FEC commissioner, James "Trey" Trainor, that the CLC had engaged in "wild speculation" by filing a complaint.

"This case wasn't about a 'fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,'" Trainor wrote. "In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech."

Zhang denounced the FEC for failing to contact Facebook regarding Muhlstein's claim to verify that he'd administered the America Progress Now page—a cursory investigation which would have immediately revealed the true owners of the page.

"It's quite possible that FB would have blown the FEC off," Zhang said. "But many employees were upset over this case, and may have come forward if asked. I would likely have if I'd known."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/11/facebook-ads-turning-point-usa-rally-forge

no lnx many

Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats

FEC investigation failed to uncover link to Rally Forge, a firm with close ties to Turning Point USA

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco

@juliacarriew

Fri 11 Jun 2021

A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal.

In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.

Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies.

Rally Forge would go on to set up a pro-Trump domestic “troll farm” for Turning Point Action, a “sister” organization of Turning Point USA, in 2020,earning a permanent ban from Facebook.

“There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.

She added: “The fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”

ads show AOC and Drake meme pix]

Some of the Facebook ads from America Progress Now. Composite: Facebook]

Devon Kearns, a spokesperson for Facebook, said: “We removed Rally Forge from our platforms for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Since the 2018 midterms, we have strengthened our policies related to election interference and political ad transparency. We continue working to make political advertising more transparent on our platform and we welcome updated regulations and help from policymakers as we evolve our policies in this space.”

The revelation that the ads were linked to a rightwing organization raises questions about the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement of campaign finance laws.APN and its ads appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the FEC and include proper disclosures on advertisements, as ProPublica and Vice News first reported in 2018.

The non-partisan campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint against APN and subsequently sued the agency in an attempt to force it to investigate the group. But in July 2020, the FEC voted to dismiss allegations that America Progress Now had violated federal law, after an individual, Evan Muhlstein, took responsibility for the ads and attributed the lack of proper disclosures and filings to his “inexperience”.

It is illegal to knowingly make false or fraudulent statements to federal agencies, and the FEC appears to have taken Muhlstein at his word that the ads were a sincere but novice attempt to support Green party candidates.

The former FEC commissioner Ann Ravel, who reviewed the case at the request of the Guardian, said that were she still on the FEC, she would now refer this “stunning” case to the justice department for investigation.

“It seems as if it’s a clear fraud,” Ravel said, noting that the FEC general counsel’s office appeared to have been “misled” by Muhlstein. “The requirement for the justice department to take on an electoral matter is that it be serious and willful, and clearly in this case it was willful, in my opinion.”

Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, said: “This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw ‘America Progress Now’ ads promoting Green party candidates would’ve had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives. The FEC’s job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters’ right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation.”

‘A crystal clear example of astroturfing’

On 27 October 2018 – just days before the 6 November election – America Progress Now began running a series of ads that used leftist motifs, such as the red rose emoji and images of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to rail against the “corporate, two-party oligarchy” and the “corporate, capitalist wage system”. Some of the ads urged voters to choose a third party, but others endorsed Green party candidates by name – triggering FEC rules for independent expenditures.

Following the 5 November publication of a ProPublica/Vice News report on the “mysterious” group behind the ads, Facebook launched a “hi-pri[ority]” escalation to investigate whether they constituted“coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) – the name Facebook gives to the kind of deceptive tactics that a Russian influence operation used during the 2016 election.

The investigation was straightforward since Facebook has access to information that regular users do not: the names of the people who control Facebook Pages. Investigators quickly realized that America Progress Now was administered by three individuals – Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg and Colton Duncan – who also served as Facebook Page administrators for Turning Point USA, the rightwing college group founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012. Hoffman and Clegg were also administrators for Kirk’s Facebook Page.

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, left, with Donald Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at a summit in 2019.]

“These admins are connected to Turning Point USA,” one staffer from the civic integrity team said, according to internal task management documents seen by the Guardian. “This is very inauthentic. I don’t know what the policy here is but this seems very sketchy.”Another staffer named Rally Forge as being responsible for the ads. APN had spent nearly $5,000 to have the ads shown to users nearly 300,000 times, a third staffer noted.

A rightwing political marketing firm that ran a $350,000 pro-Trump Super Pac in the 2016 election, Rally Forge was founded and run by Hoffman, an Arizona Republican who was at the time a member of the town council in Queen Creek, Arizona. In November 2020 Hoffman was elected to serve in the Arizona state legislature.

Clegg and Duncan were alumni of Texas State University, where they had been elected student body president and vice-president respectively in 2017. Clegg was impeached and removed from office shortly before his term would have ended in 2018. Duncan resigned from his post in 2017; he appears to have been hired directly by Turning Point USA in 2019.

Since 2017, Rally Forge has been Turning Point USA’s highest-compensated independent contractor, paid more than $1.1m over two years, according to the non-profit’s public filings. Turning Point Action, an affiliated organization also founded by Kirk, paid Rally Forge $700,000 for work supporting Trump and opposing Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign, and an additional $400,000 for work on the US Senate runoff races in Georgia.

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, said that neither Turning Point USA nor Turning Point Action had “any involvement” with America Progress Now or its Facebook ads.

In addition to America Progress Now and Turning Point USA, Hoffman, Clegg and Duncan all also served as administrators for a number of other rightwing Facebook Pages. The trio each maintained two accounts to administer their Facebook Pages, one using their full names and one using their first and middle initials – a violation of the company’s policy that each user can only have one Facebook account. One of each of the three men’s accounts had been authorized by Facebook to run political ads, a process that required submitting a government ID to Facebook for verification.

One of Hoffman’s accounts had spent approximately $650,000 to run Facebook ads on behalf of 40 Pages, including the official Page of Donald Trump Jr.

The intention here is clearly to mislead users

Facebook civic integrity staffer]

Hoffman declined to answer detailed questions from the Guardian, including about the nature of Rally Forge’s relationship with Muhlstein. “The premise of your questions is either ill-informed or intentionally misleading,” he said in a statement. “Rally Forge is a marketing agency, not a compliance company. Furthermore, it is my understanding that the small handful of ads, totaling less than 2,500 dollars, which qualified as independent expenditures, have been fully disclosed by the responsible organization in coordination with the FEC.”

Duncan said that he had never heard of America Progress Now before the Guardian’s inquiries and had “zero knowledge or insight into the group”. When asked about the CG Duncan account, which had passed Facebook’s verification process and was an administrator of the APN page, he responded: “I urge you to reach out to JM [Hoffman]. Let me know what you find out, I’m as curious as you are.”

Clegg did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him.

Despite possessing clear evidence of inauthenticity, Facebook staffers determined the Green party ads did not violate existing company policies related to political ads or CIB. They decided to deactivate the three men’s extra accounts, but after the election and only after providing them with advance notice.

The episode inspired some disquiet among Facebook staff.

“What I find very problematic is that the intention here is clearly to mislead users,” said the civic integrity staffer. “The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity, which would be grounds for removal on most surfaces,” she added, referring to Facebook’s rules requiring people to use their real names on their accounts.

One product manager produced an internal postmortem of the incident in which she described it as “a crystal clear example of astroturfing” – deceptive campaign tactics designed to appear as grassroots actions – “… as well as playing both sides … and political ad opacity, since users cannot see who they are. Furthermore, I could see making a case for voter suppression.”

‘The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity,’ said a Facebook civic integrity staffer. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

“Unfortunately, it turned out there was nothing we could do against these ads,” she added. “We ended up only aiming to remove a few [duplicate] accounts under the fake account policy, but only after proper notice – and I believe we have not removed them yet.”

“Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?” she asked.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the company had indeed removed the duplicate accounts following the midterms, and that Rally Forge’s network of Pages and accounts had gone dormant after November 2018. The company made a number of updates to its policies on political ads before the 2020 elections, including requiring advertisers to provide more information about their organizations before being authorized to run ads. It also introduced a new policy to encourage more transparency regarding who runs networks of Facebook Pages.

Rally Forge reactivated its network of Pages and accounts in June 2020, according to Facebook. It established a domestic “troll farm” in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed.

Facebook said that its automated systems had detected and deleted fake accounts made by Rally Forge, which then created “thinly veiled personas” to carry out deceptive campaigning. In October 2020, the platform permanently banned Rally Forge and Hoffman for violating its policy against CIB, work that Facebook said the firm had undertaken “on behalf of Turning Point USA” and another client.

A spokesman for Turning Point USA disputed the characterization of the operation as a “troll farm” and noted that it was a project of Turning Point Action, which is a separate entity.

Facebook did not take any enforcement action against Turning Point USA, Turning Point Action or Kirk with regard to the Phoenix operation. Facebook also did not disclose Rally Forge’s connection to America Progress Now and the deceptive Green Party ads.

A forestalled investigation

In September 2019, CLC filed a complaint alleging that APN’s failure to register with the FEC violated federal law. The FEC responded by sending a letter to an inaccurate address that America Progress Now had listed on its Facebook Page, but it does not appear to have taken further action, prompting CLC to sue it in February 2020.

“If nothing is done, the FEC will instead be sending a message that anonymous or fake entities like America Progress Now can pop into existence just prior to an election, exploit lax registration and reporting requirements by digital platforms, spend unlimited sums of money, and then disappear into thin air once an election is over,” the group said at the time.

In April 2020, the FEC wrote again, this time to the address listed on an Arizona state business filing for America Progress Now.

On 15 April 2020, Evan Muhlstein responded to the FEC by email. Muhlstein described the lack of filing as an “error”,writing, “I believe that it is important for the commission to understand that any potential failure on either of those items is based entirely on my inexperience to the process.” He wrote that he had “assumed that Facebook’s ‘political disclaimer/disclosure’ was all that was necessary”, said his expenditures totaled “only $2,467.54”, and expressed surprise that “a spend as small as this would require any type of reporting”.

Donald Trump speaks at a Turning Point USA summit in 2019.]

“I again offer my sincerest apology for any potential errors in failing to disclose,” Muhlstein wrote. “Given the apparent obstacles and unknowns of participating in the election process in this manner (of which I am learning some of now), it is highly unlikely I will ever participate in it again. I feel terrible for having been so ignorant to the process.”

Muhlstein also expressed his desire to come into compliance “correctly and quickly”. At no point in the communication did Muhlstein disclose that the advertisements had been handled by a major political marketing firm.

“Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC is extremely misleading and might warrant a criminal investigation,” said Fischer, of the CLC.

Muhlstein did not respond to multiple attempts to make contact with him. His connection to Rally Forge is not known. He is a resident of Queen Creek, Arizona, the town where Hoffman also lives.

The FEC has the power to issue subpoenas and carry out serious investigations, but only after a vote of four of its five commissioners.

In a report dated 4 May, the FEC’s general counsel argued that, while it appeared that Muhlstein had violated federal law, the small amount of money involved and Muhlstein’s statement that he was unlikely to engage in further political spending led it to recommend that the FEC exercise prosecutorial discretion and dismiss the allegations with a warning.

In July, the FEC voted to follow the general counsel’s recommendation and dismiss the case, forestalling any actual investigation.

Commissioner James “Trey” Trainor went further, lambasting the CLC in a statement of reasons. “Contrary to CLC’s wild speculation, this case wasn’t about a ‘fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,’” he wrote. “In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech.”

Trainor asserted that “there was no evidence to contradict” Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC “and no evidence to support CLC’s salacious theories about the ‘unknown person or persons’ behind APN”.

It would not be until 23 December 2020 – six months after the FEC had voted not to pursue the allegations of law violations and more than two years after the election – that Muhlstein would provide the FEC with that evidence, when he finally registered APN with the FEC and disclosed that the independent expenditure had been made through Rally Forge.

The FEC did not respond to questions from the Guardian, citing a policy not to comment on enforcement matters. Trainor did not respond to a request for comment. Fischer said: “It looks like we were right.”

Daniel Hernandez contributed reporting

implemented?

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/03/new-fec-new-rules-for-digital-ads/

Federal Election Commission (FEC) voted on Wednesday to move forward with new:{rules:(style="box-sizing:inherit;max-height:1e+06px"):}: that would bump up disclosure requirements for certain political ads on platforms like Facebook and Google.

The move comes as spending on the 2018 midterms is ramping up and as both lawmakers and digital platforms look to prevent continued foreign influence in American elections.

Any rule change may not be in place for the bulk of this election year as well, and last week FEC Republican Chairwoman Caroline Hunter expressed apprehension about “changing the rules of the game” midway through an election cycle.

At the meeting, commissioners presented two proposals that would require new disclaimers on “express advocacy” ads on digital platforms. “Express advocacy” ads advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate and makeup just a small percentage of online ads.

The commission voted 4-0 to open 60 days for public comments and have scheduled a June 27 public hearing on the matter.

The two proposals vary in their requirements for the size and content of disclaimers, among other differences. One proposal would also define the term “internet communication.” The measures would also only cover a small portion of political advertising on digital platforms and likely not affect the types of ads that allowed for the harnessing of Facebook and other digital platforms by Russian actors in 2016.

However, Democrat Ellen Weintraub, the FEC’s vice chairwoman, called the commission’s vote a “step in the right direction” for transparency of digital advertising, a medium that is expected to be increasingly experimented with since the Trump campaign successfully harnessed it in 2016.

Political spending on digital ads is projected to:{grow by 2,539 percent:(style="box-sizing:inherit;max-height:1e+06px"):}: between 2014 and 2018, according to a recent study.

“I think it will be an improvement,” Weintraub said of the FEC’s proposals. “It will bring greater transparency to political ads. It’s not going to solve all the problems that we saw in the last election.”

Despite butting heads in the process of:{drafting the proposed rules:(style="box-sizing:inherit;max-height:1e+06px"):}:, commissioners noted the urgency to create rules to regulate the growing realm of digital advertising.

“It has taken another event like Watergate to make everyone realize we have to act in a bipartisan [effort] in order to do something,” said Commissioner Steven Walther, an independent.

Republican Commissioner Matthew Petersen said they were “threading the needle,” trying not to overregulate but also working toward greater transparency.

“We have a strong interest in ensuring that we are not impeding the further development of the internet and technology as a means of allowing and facilitating political communication,” Petersen said, “but at the same time ensuring that the disclaimer requirements … are also being met.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/think-dishonest-politics-and-dark-money-elections-are-bad-now-court-ruling-opens-floodgates-for-scam-pacs/

ct fail?

A federal judge on Thursday struck down FEC regulations barring unauthorized political action committees from using a candidate’s name to mislead voters and attract donations, a ruling critics warned could lead to the proliferation of “scam PACs.”

Paul S. Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation with Common Cause, said the ruling “will embolden scam PACs to trade on the names of candidates to raise money for their own ends from unknowing citizens.”

“The Federal Election Commission (FEC) can and should still be enforcing the ban—and opening a rulemaking to establish new disclaimer requirements for non-candidate websites that use a candidate’s name in the URL,” Ryan added.

In a series of tweets, FEC chair Ellen Weintraub explained that political action committees are still barred from using candidates’ names in their formal titles.

But, Weintraub continued, the judge’s ruling will allow PACs to use candidates’ names in their “solicitations, other communications, and special projects.”

“This can be grossly misleading, and this is the hole scam PACs are going to drive a truck through,” Weintraub warned.

As NPR‘s Jessica Taylor reported, there have already been cases of PACs using candidates’ names to trick unwitting citizens out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

“Earlier this week, federal prosecutors charged a California man with setting up political action committees purporting to support prominent Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, bilking donors out of more than $250,000,” Taylor wrote.

Taylor continued:

Another example, pointed out by the Center for Public Integrity’s Dave Levinthal, roped in “James Bond” actor Daniel Craig, who thought he was donating to a super PAC supporting Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Democratic presidential bid in 2016.

The group was initially named “Ready for Bernie Sanders 2016” and “Bet on Bernie 2016,” even though they had no affiliation with Sanders, who had renounced any super PAC support. Thus, the confusion from Craig and others.

After the judge’s ruling on Thursday, said Weintraub, such scams are likely to become far more common.

“This is unfortunate,” she tweeted. “It will lead to confusion in the political marketplace. It provides a wide opening for scam PACs to exploit.”

FEC rejects proposal to consider new rules on foreign spending in US elections

May 25, 2018 | The FEC has considered similar proposals before, but none have passed. Vice Chair Ellen Weintraub, who proposed the motion, expressed concern about the possibility of foreign groups using dark money to influence the 2018 midterms.