A gun safety group, Giffords, and a campaign finance watchdog, the Campaign Legal Center, are suing the Federal Election Commission for failing to act on multiple complaints alleging that the National Rifle Association unlawfully coordinated with Donald Trump and other Republican candidates in recent elections. And the lawsuit is poised to act as a major test for the FEC chair’s new strategy to try and force the agency to take more aggressive action to police campaign finance.
Ellen Weintraub, the chair of the FEC, can’t discuss specific ongoing cases, but her recent statements make it clear that she doesn’t plan on voting to defend the agency in any cases involving delays in agency action. If she follows through on this promise, it would result in the first actual instance of her utilizing a new strategy, as Mother Jones first reported, to effectively sabotage her own agency in order to enforce campaign finance law, a move that one former FEC lawyer termed the “nuclear option.”