Federal prosecutors discounted the legal effects of “routine partisan deadlocks” at the Federal Election Commission in a new court filing in the Department of Justice’s long-running criminal case against former aides to the 2012 Ron Paul presidential campaign (U.S. v. Benton, S.D. Iowa, No. 15-cr-103, government response 4/18/16).The new filing, signed by Raymond Hulser, chief of DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, and Richard Pilger, director of the department’s Election Crimes Branch, sought to counter a recent defense filing in the case, which argued that the defendants can’t be convicted of disclosure violations because the FEC has ruled that reports of campaign disbursements do not have to list the person who ultimately receives a payment (4237 Money & Politics Report, 4/14/16)….DOJ’s response, filed April 18, said the deadlocked votes in the cases should have no effect on the pending criminal case in Iowa.“As the government has argued previously, there is no need to resort to administrative law to interpret the simple false reporting statute charged here,” prosecutors said, “and the Court has previously found that the elements of the charged violation of the Act can be readily explained to a jury in eight lines of text.”