Ryan Scoville has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming Duke Law Journal). Here is the abstract: In making appointments to the office of ambassador, U.S. presidents often select political supporters from outside the ranks of the State Department’s professional diplomatic corps. This … Continue reading
Category Archives: campaigns
Good Amanda Becker piece for Reuters: Legally, Super PACs are supposed to operate independently of candidates and cannot contribute to them directly. In reality, they often are run by donors close to the candidates and their campaigns.David Donnelly, president of … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
Updated Campaign Finance Institute report. … Continue reading
Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker: Psy-Group’s larger ambition was to break into the U.S. election market. During the 2016 Presidential race, the company pitched members of Donald Trump’s campaign team on its ability to influence the … Continue reading
NYT: In the 2020 race for the White House, small donors are expected to play a more significant role than ever before. With so many Democratic candidates running, and only so much money to go around, whom small donors choose … Continue reading
The DOJ press release headline refers to the worker as a “Board of Elections Election Official” but that seems incorrect. From an earlier HuffPost piece: The sole U.S. citizen facing charges ― Denslo Allen Paige, a 66-year-old Walmart worker who … Continue reading
The Trace: A joint congressional inquiry is demanding that National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre hand over internal documents showing whether the NRA made “illegal, excessive, and unreported in-kind donations” to the campaigns of Donald Trump and several GOP Senate … Continue reading
Potentially a big deal here: “In particular, the Government represents that aspects of its investigation remains ongoing, including those pertaining to or arising from Cohen’s campaign finance crimes.”A bad sentence for Individual 1 and the Trump Org execs who hatched … Continue reading
Mother Jones: From the looks of it, GOP politicians got what they wanted, too. From the time the tax bill was first introduced on Nov. 2, 2017, until the end of the year, a 60-day period, dozens of billionaires and … Continue reading
CBS News: There is no evidence to date of any foreign interference in the 2018 midterm elections, according to a new joint report released by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments on Tuesday. While specific conclusions remain classified, the report … Continue reading
NYT: In the subpoena, investigators also showed interest in whether any foreigners illegally donated to the committee, as well as whether committee staff members knew that such donations were illegal, asking for documents laying out legal requirements for donations. Federal … Continue reading
Peter Overby for NPR: As Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand jumped into the Democratic presidential nomination contest, they staked out the same position against corporate campaign cash.“The money in politics is corrupting. It controls everything,” Gillibrand told a gathering in Des Moines, … Continue reading
Interesting. … Continue reading
Robby Mook: Wow. Does Trump’s campaign have an 85% burn rate?! How is that possible?"The latest fundraising disclosures bring the total haul for Trump's reelection effort to more than $129 million…The campaign had more than $19.2 million in cash on … Continue reading
CPI reports. … Continue reading
Here’s how the WaPo fact check ends: Trump says he never ordered Cohen to break the law and silence Daniels and McDougal. But when he says such payoffs are not criminal to begin with, his defense goes off the rails. … Continue reading
I have written this piece for Slate. It begins: Why didn’t Special Counsel Robert Mueller charge self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone with violating campaign finance laws? And what does this say about Donald Trump Jr.’s potential exposure for his Trump … Continue reading
Politico: President Donald Trump’s political team and top Republican officials have reached a landmark agreement to reshape the party’s fundraising apparatus and close the financial gap that devastated them in the midterms. With the deal, Republicans hope to create a … Continue reading
WRAL: In the summer of 2017, the chief prosecutor for Bladen County sent the head of North Carolina’s State Board of Elections a series of increasingly insistent emails over the board’s voting integrity concerns in his county. The upshot: Why … Continue reading
NYT: When it came to sharing fake news on Facebook during the 2016 election, no age group was quite as active as those aged 65 and older, according to a new study. The study, published Wednesday in Science Advances, quantifies how … Continue reading
Release: Today, Common Cause released a new report on the many ways presidential candidates bend and break campaign finance laws as they barnstorm early primary states, fundraise, evade contributions limits, and build their campaign teams while denying they are running … Continue reading
NYT: Senator Doug Jones, the Democrat who was an unwitting beneficiary of misinformation tactics during a special election in Alabama in 2017, asked the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday to investigate the episodes. Mr. Jones made his formal request for … Continue reading
BuzzFeed: The pair of outside groups tied closely to President Donald Trump has retained the top Republican opposition group in an effort to smother Democrats seeking to challenge him — and perhaps even help pick his 2020 challenger. The early … Continue reading
AP: Long before accusations of absentee ballot fraud in a small North Carolina county cast doubt on the results of a heated 2018 congressional race, a state elections investigator spent weeks probing whether the man at the center of the current scandal … Continue reading
WaPo: The solicitations piled into voters’ email accounts — sometimes multiple times a day. And they carried alarming messages, often in blaring capital letters. “We’re on the verge of BANKRUPTCY.” “Our bank account is ALMOST EMPTY!” “Trump is INCHES away … Continue reading
NYT: The “Dry Alabama” Facebook page, illustrated with stark images of car wrecks and videos of families ruined by drink, had a blunt message: Alcohol is the devil’s work, and the state should ban it entirely. Along with a companion … Continue reading
WaPo: A secret effort to influence the 2017 Senate election in Alabama used tactics inspired by Russian disinformation teams, including the creation of fake accounts to deliver misleading messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of voters to help elect … Continue reading
NYT: Last year at this time, Republicans feared the “blue wave,” a surge of voter enthusiasm for Democrats in the midterm elections. With the election over, and the fears of Republicans partially realized, the party’s worry has shifted to the … Continue reading
NYT: Reid Hoffman, the tech billionaire whose money was spent on Russian-style social media deception in a Senate race last year, apologized on Wednesday, saying in a statement that he had not approved the operation and did not support such tactics in American politics. … Continue reading
WaPo: Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday that his office is exploring whether disinformation tactics deployed against Republican Roy Moore during last year’s special election violated state campaign laws and said he was worried that the operation could have … Continue reading
ProPublica: Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a blind spot in campaign finance laws to undercut a candidate from their own party this year — and their fingerprints remained hidden until the primary was already over. Super PACs, … Continue reading
Mark Joseph Stern for Slate: Last Monday, the Washington Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Seattle’s “democracy vouchers,” an innovative public financing scheme that’s already spreading to other cities. The measure has already allowed more young people, women, racial minorities, and low-income voters to contribute to … Continue reading
NYT: The first votes of the Democratic presidential primary remain more than a year away, but black voters are keenly aware of the prominent role they will play in choosing the next nominee. In 2016, Mr. Sanders’s “political revolution” flamed … Continue reading
WRAL editorial. … Continue reading
AP: North Carolina’s top elections official issued an urgent plea nearly two years ago for the Trump administration to file criminal charges against the man now at the center of ballot fraud allegations that have thrown a 2018 congressional race … Continue reading
NYT: Senator Doug Jones of Alabama on Thursday said he was “outraged” to learn of deceptive online operations used by fellow Democrats to assist his election last year, and called for a federal investigation into the matter. He was responding … Continue reading
WRAL: The man at the center of a state inquiry into 9th Congressional District election results indicated in a signed declaration last year that he essentially took cash under the table during the 2014 elections to help Bladen County’s current … Continue reading
Center for Responsive Politics: The Trump campaign funneled money to ad buyers alleged to have facilitated illegal coordination between the campaign and the NRA by routing funds through a secretive LLC that appears to be little more than a shell … Continue reading
News and Observer: McCrae Dowless, a Bladen County elected official and political operative, paid workers to collect absentee ballots and return them to him before the 2016 election, witnesses told state board of election investigators, according to documents released Wednesday afternoon. The … Continue reading
Montana Free Press: Thousands of newly uncovered documents and recently filed court records bolster already mounting evidence tying the anti-union National Right to Work Committee to the political activities of conservative nonprofit groups accused of improperly coordinating Republican legislative primary … Continue reading
Joe Davidson WaPo column. … Continue reading
Report: As Democrats and Republicans battled for dominance in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in 2018, super PACs and dark money groups collectively outspent the candidates’ own campaigns in a recordbreaking 16 races, according to data provided … Continue reading
WRAL: The attorney for McCrae Dowless, the Bladen County political operative at the center of a state investigation into election irregularities in the 9th Congressional District, said Tuesday that her client “has not violated any state or federal campaign laws, … Continue reading
AP reports. As with the voter id bill, this one may be subject to a veto override. Republicans want a new primary in case the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, is tainted by the allegations of fraud in Bladen County. … Continue reading
WaPo: New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced that the Donald J. Trump Foundation is dissolving as her office pursues its lawsuit against the charity, Trump and his three eldest children. The attorney general’s suit, filed in June, alleged “persistently … Continue reading
WRAL editorial: It is hard to imagine where the North Carolina GOP leadership found the gall to have the Ninth Congressional District Republican Executive Committee pass a “resolution” demanding the State Board of Elections “immediately certify” Mark Harris the winner of that district’s … Continue reading
Star Advertiser: Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was born a U.S. citizen and served two tours of duty in the Middle East as a member of the Army National Guard. She’s served in elective office — as a member of the Hawaii … Continue reading
Philip Bump for WaPo: When Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, announced on the weekend before this year’s midterm elections that Democrats in the state had tried to illegally access the state’s voter database, the announcement was treated with a … Continue reading
NYT: The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of posts on Instagram … Continue reading