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Asked for his thoughts about the resignation of Jeff Roe from Never Back Down over the weekend, DeSantis told reporters, “I’m not involved in any of that.” “As you guys know, it’s a separate entity and so it’s just … this stuff just happens, and it’s not in my purview of what’s out there,” DeSantis continued. He later added, “It’s not a distraction for me … I know media may want to do it but at the end of the day, I’m focused on the mission.” Roe’s resignation from Never Back Down came hours after a Washington Post report shared...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis broke campaign finance law by communicating about TV spending decisions with a big-dollar super PAC that is supporting his Republican bid for the White House, a nonpartisan government watchdog group alleged in a complaint filed Monday. The Campaign Legal Center cited recent reporting by The Associated Press and others in the complaint, which was filed with the Federal Election Commission. It alleges that the degree of coordination and communication between DeSantis’ campaign and Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting him, crossed a legal line set in place when the Supreme Court first opened the door...

Jeff Roe, longtime Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) consultant and chief architect of his flailing political operation, resigned Saturday from the super PAC charged with realizing the governor’s increasingly quixotic presidential aspirations. Roe announced his departure hours after a damning Washington Post report on the collapse of Never Back Down (NBD), the super PAC Roe conceptualized to send DeSantis to the White House and usher in a new era of super PAC-driven presidential campaigns. The Post report comes after five senior officials, pre-dating Roe’s departure, left NBD since late November and three others with Roe’s firm were fired. The Post writes...

Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib violated the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 by paying herself a salary from her campaign after securing victory in the 2018 general election, the House Ethics Committee unanimously ruled on Friday. The Ethics committee found that Tlaib violated FECA’s personal use restrictions by paying herself $10,800 from her campaign when she was no longer a congressional candidate in late 2018 and ordered her to repay that amount back to her campaign within one year, the committee said in a report. The committee “determined that the evidence is sufficient to support a determination that a...

The staff, the ad spending, the campaigning -- Michael Bloomberg was going to do all of this to defeat President Donald Trump already. Doing it as a 'candidate' excempts him from limits on PACs and political donations. There is very good reason to believe Michael Bloomberg isn’t actually running for president.Of course, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For one, he declared he is. He’s also hired more than 1,000 staff and is still expanding, offering salaries far above campaign averages. This week, he became the first of the declared candidates to have campaigned in all 14 states...

The overwhelming majority of 2020 general election voters would like to see the Federal Election Commission (FEC) take a more active role in enforcing existing campaign finance laws on the books as corruption was rated the most serious problem facing the country, a poll released Monday found. The poll of 855 likely 2020 presidential voters, commissioned by the Campaign Legal Center, a bipartisan watchdog organization, found that 54% of respondents viewed corruption in politics as the most pressing issue facing the country, outranking rising healthcare costs, climate change, illegal immigration and wage stagnation. Other major concerns for voters include unlimited...

President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, may have been convinced by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to plead guilty to a supposed violation of campaign finance law, but that doesn’t mean that what happened is actually a federal crime. In fact, neither the Federal Election Commission—which is the independent agency tasked with enforcing the Federal Election Campaign Act—nor its former commissioners would likely agree with the overaggressive view that the Southern District is taking. Indeed, the Southern District’s aggressive stance on this issue might have violated the Justice Department’s own policy....

If Mueller's witch hunt is dumb enough to try and take down Trump by claiming that hush money paid to the two women was a campaign finance law violation, then Mueller must also go after all the Congressmen who secretly used taxpayer funds to silence claims against them of sexual harassment. Such a secret use of taxpayer funds is also embezzlement and they all should be prosecuted.

When it comes to the law, who you gonna believe: legal scholars, or Alisyn Camerota, with her American University degree in “broadcast journalism?” On CNN this morning, co-host Camerota claimed that it was an “open and shut case” that it was a crime for the Trump campaign to meet with Russians for the purpose of taking dirt on Hillary from them. Always one to keep an open mind, Camerota added: “I don’t want to parse this anymore. The law says you can’t do this. It’s very clear. The law explicitly says you cannot do this.” Except that, when it comes...

(Reuters) - Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative commentator and best-selling author, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for arranging excessive campaign contributions to a candidate for the U.S. Senate. According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, D'Souza around August 2012 reimbursed people who he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate's campaign. The candidate was not named in the indictment. Attempts to reach D'Souza and a lawyer representing him were unsuccessful. D'Souza was charged in the indictment with one count of making illegal contributions in the names of others, and one count...

The conservative filmmaker behind a hit anti-Obama documentary was indicted Thursday night on charges he violated federal campaign laws, in what a close colleague is calling a “selective prosecution.” Dinesh D'Souza, whose “2016: Obama’s America” is the second-highest grossing political documentary of all time, will appear in U.S. District Court in New York Friday. The indictment states the 52-year-old best-selling author and activist will be charged with one count of illegally donating to a Senate campaign and one count of causing false statements to be made to authorities in connection with the contributions. FoxNews.com has confirmed that the donation in...

The Federal Election Commission is showing signs that it might allow a Guyana-born American citizen to file papers and raise money to run for president of the United States. The agency released two draft advisory opinions Friday that could permit New York lawyer Abdul Hassan to go through the initial steps to run for president. But the FEC’s pending decision won’t be the last word on the constitutional issue of whether someone born outside the United States can be president. Hassan was born in the South American country in 1974, and he asked the FEC in July whether he could...

OPENING ARGUMENT 'Issue Ads' And Common Sense By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal © National Journal Group Inc. Monday, April 30, 2007 Eight Supreme Court justices spent an hour on April 25 arguing [PDF] with three lawyers and one another about the constitutionality of the federal regulation governing political advertising by nonprofit advocacy corporations. But all nine justices and all three lawyers missed what, I respectfully submit, should be the point of the case. They should be focusing on how Congress rigged the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law to protect its own members from criticism by their constituents. Congress carefully...

The Florida Division of Elections issued a five page legal opinion on September 21 that has many people worried about the future on campaign financing in the state, according to the Miami Herald. The opinion stated that third-party groups can contribute an unlimited amount of money to a campaign to be used in the mass media, with the only stipulation being that the campaign advertisements can not explicitly tell the voter how to vote. Last year, after a United States Supreme Court ruling upheld federal restrictions on campaign financing, Florida state legislators passed a law requiring third-party groups to report...

COMMENTARY Big Labor's ties to the Democratic Party are no secret, but the way in which unions will use their members' dues to influence this year's presidential race may be the most ignored political story in this election. Like corporations and other groups, unions collect voluntary contributions from their members for their political action committees, which then make donations to specific candidates or political parties. In 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog organization, union PACs donated $85 million to Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party. That's a hefty sum, but, in fact, direct contributions...

NRA seeks to buy media outlet to bypass campaign finance law 12/07/03 Sharon Theimer Associated Press Washington- Hoping to spend as much as it wants on next year's elections, the National Rifle Association is looking to buy a television or radio station and declare that it should be treated as a news organization, exempt from spending limits in the campaign finance law. "We're looking at bringing a court case that we're as legiti mate a media outlet as Disney or Viacom or Time-Warner," said the NRA's executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre. The nation's gun lobby is talking with potential investors...

CAPITOL IDEASBy Tom BethellCelebrating My 40th Anniversary        I write on August 28, which is the 40th anniversary of my arrival in these United States. It is a date I am always conscious of. The changes since 1962 have been immense, of course, and I won’t hazard any conclusions here. I am inclined to say that the changes have mostly been for the worse, but I am not confident of that. Our lives are so besieged by change that any contemporary judgment is likely to be ill advised. Old-timers in any event are notoriously inclined to look back on a...

Perhaps the Second Circuit was tired of the Ninth Circuit getting all the press. Sure, the Ninth Circuit is the most overturned circuit in the country, a status punctuated by jaw-dropping opinions like the one striking down the Pledge of Allegiance, but the Second Circuit has a reputation to defend as well. Showing that it can still offer an opinion truly worthy of reversal, a panel of the Second Circuit earlier this month upheld Vermont's comprehensive campaign-finance law, a statute that includes limits on campaign expenditures.Reaching this conclusion was no easy task for the Second Circuit. After all, the...