WaPo:

The Justice Department is stepping up scrutiny of the increasingly cozy ties between candidates and their outside allies, a move that could jolt the freewheeling campaign-finance atmosphere ahead of the 2016 elections….Anthony Herman, another former FEC general counsel, said it appears that federal prosecutors “view themselves as filling a role — to the extent that they think the FEC is not on the job, they think part of their job is to fill that gap.”

Even so, pursuing coordination cases and securing convictions is not easy without inside information. The few known cases in which federal prosecutors have investigated illegal coordination were driven by tips they received while pursuing other alleged crimes.

“It is going to be very difficult to bring these kinds of cases and to ferret out instances of unlawful coordination,” said Herman, a senior counsel at Covington & Burling.

Nick Confessore: “WaPo piece on illegal coordination probes is basically a big Justice Department beg for whistleblowers. Hard to make these cases.”