A federal judge recently ordered the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to investigate whether or not the NRA broke campaign finance laws by allegedly using shell companies to skirt rules and coordinate directly with multiple Republican candidates, including the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016. The FEC doesn't want to conduct the investigation, which makes this case even more bizarre. Farron Cousins discusses this issue.
Link - https://www.salon.com/2021/10/06/orders-fec-to-investigate-allegations-nra-illegally-gave-to-campaigns/
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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.
Recently a federal judge ordered the federal election commission, the FEC to actually start doing their job and investigating multiple claims of the NRA, the national rifle association, abusing campaign, finance laws, and essentially breaking campaign finance laws by donating and coordinating with Republican candidates in amounts that far exceed the legal limit. And according to the complaints, the NRA was able to do this because they used a bunch of different shell companies to give this money. And by the way, one of the people who received this, uh, alleged ill gotten in RA money was Donald Trump in 2016, he received 25 million from them. And I don't know if you're familiar with campaign finance limits, but yeah, 25 million is a little bit over, a little bit over that legal limit. So the judge told the FEC that they had to comply with its statutory duty to act and then gave them 30 days to get started.
These complaints, by the way, filed by the Giffords law center to prevent gun vies. Um, these complaints were filed years ago. Okay. The Giffords law center had this information. They put together their evidence. They filed the lawsuit and the lawsuit basically just says somebody for the love of God, investigate these people. We know the NRAS already been investigated for receiving foreign money in recent years, and that's not going very well for them. And here we have this evidence again, put together by Giffords law center saying, ah, FEC, wake up. They're using shell companies to skirt campaign finance laws, and one give more than the legal limit and to illegally coordinate the spending with the campaigns themselves, which even for super superpacs that's illegal. So why didn't the FEC act? Why didn't they do anything on glad you asked? Cause salon.com has the answer to that.
Former president Trump had previously stacked the FEC with GOP loyalists, including Trey trainer, a former Trump campaign aid. While at the same time, leaving enough seats vacant that the regulatory body was not able to meet for most of last year. And when it finally reconvened in December, 2020, they had a mass, a whopping, a backlog of 446 cases. So Trump crippled the FEC, made it to where they didn't have the ability to actually go out and do these investigations that they are supposed to be doing. And no folks, I don't think that is a cool wind Sundance. I think that this was an intentional move by Donald Trump, perhaps the
Request of other Republicans who, you know, don't want the FEC looking over their shoulder, which we have the FEC looking over multiple Republican shoulders right now. Most notably, obviously Lauren Bovert, but Trump did this to cripple the agency. And it's something by the way, the Republicans do all the time, they underfund understaff and then they go out to the public and say, look at this, see the government doesn't even work, but it doesn't work because you've made it to where it can't work. Just to prove your talking point, that it doesn't work. That's the level of hypocrisy that we're dealing with with Republicans right now, everything that we've talked about with the NRA, this is all alleged. Okay. Nothing has been proven in court. There have been no real, uh, legal investigations. I mean, and by legal, I mean with, you know, law enforcement officials looking into this, so it's all alleged, the NRA may be squeaky clean and all of this. And if they are, Hey, great, fantastic for you, but it sure as hell doesn't look that that way. And uh, if the FEC doesn't get off their asses, we may not ever get an answer because especially with the Trump campaign issue, we're only a few weeks away from the statute of limitations on that one.
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