In a significant ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ordered the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on July 8 to address nearly $6 million in campaign finance violations by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and an affiliated super PAC, Correct the Record.
This legal decision, stemming from a complaint that has been argued for years by the ethics watchdog Campaign Legal Center (CLC), marks a crucial moment in the ongoing battle for transparency in campaign finance — but was largely ignored by the mainstream media.
The court found that the Clinton campaign and Correct the Record violated federal election law by coordinating activities worth nearly $6 million without properly reporting them as in-kind contributions.
This amount dwarfs the $130,000 at the center of former President Donald Trump’s recent felony convictions in New York for misreporting business records in violation of campaign finance laws — by a stunning 45 time larger amount.
According to the CLC, the original complaint was “prompted by Correct the Record spending up to $9 million to coordinate activities with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, with neither entity reporting these funds as in-kind contributions in its FEC filings.”
This coordination included a wide range of activities such as conducting polls, hiring teams of “fact-checkers,” and paying Hillary Clinton media surrogates paired with news outlets.
The crux of the issue lies in the relationship between the Clinton campaign and Correct the Record. As the CLC explains, “independent expenditure groups like super PACs, as a condition of their status, pledge not to coordinate their spending with candidates’ campaigns.”
However, evidence suggests that Correct the Record openly coordinated nearly $6 million of these expenditures with the Clinton campaign, potentially violating this fundamental principle of campaign finance law.
The FEC had originally tried to dismiss the complaint in 2019, citing an “internet exemption” for “unpaid” communications made for online distribution.
After years of litigation, the courts just rejected this move, stating that “the internet exemption cannot be read to exempt from disclosure those expenditures that are only tangentially related to an eventual internet message or post.”
The CLC argued that “much of the unlawful coordination identified — such as opposition research, training campaign spokespeople, and press outreach — were not solely web-based in nature.”
The court agreed, finding that the FEC’s dismissal was “contrary to law.”
This ruling is particularly significant given the current political climate.
“As we head into an election season that is likely to break past records on campaign spending, the FEC has a duty to crack down on entities who violate campaign finance laws,” the CLC wrote, emphasizing that “voters have a right to know who is spending money to try and influence our elections.”
The court’s decision directs the FEC to reconsider its dismissal and potentially investigate and enforce the law regarding the Clinton campaign violations — reopening a scandal many thought dead 5 years ago.
This could have far-reaching implications for how campaign finance laws are enforced in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.
It’s worth noting that this is not the only campaign finance issue the Clinton campaign has faced. In 2022, the campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay $113,000 to settle a separate FEC investigation into alleged violations related to the funding of the debunked Steele dossier.
The CLC celebrated last weeks ruling against the Clinton campaign as “a major win for transparency in a case that has gone on for nearly a decade, particularly at a time when the FEC’s poor enforcement of the law has helped fuel an environment where big donors across the ideological spectrum are doing everything they can to gain an unfair share of influence in our democracy.”