A former Democratic chair of the Federal Election Commission who repeatedly rejected charges she was targeting Republicans and conservative websites like the Drudge Report has admitted that the agency has an anti-GOP bias.
Ann Ravel, now a lecturer at the University of California Berkeley Law School, told an alumni magazine that the FEC has taken cases biased against the Republicans.
Q: Where do the cases that come before the FEC come from? Is there any possibility that they could be in some way biased against Republicans?
Ravel: Absolutely. The cases have come primarily from watchdog groups, and most of those groups are on the liberal side.
In fact, during one period when Ravel was on the FEC, the complaints against Republicans were about three for every one against Democrats.
As a commissioner, Ravel took many stabs at conservative websites and the FEC even looked at case involving notable newsmakers like Sean Hannity. The Republicans on the evenly-split agency stopped those efforts.
It became such an issue that former Chairman Lee Goodman warned in an interview with Secrets that the Democrats were trying to silence conservative media outlets.
In the school alumni magazine interview Ravel ripped Republicans on the commission, claiming without any evidence that a pact was made years ago by the GOP members to vote against Democrats.
She even put the blame on President Trump’s top lawyer, Don McGahn, who was on the FEC. She said, “My understanding is that, sometime around 2005, it was the suggestion of Don McGahn (who is presently the White House counsel) to Sen. Mitch McConnell that if he appointed three Republican commissioners, and if they all knew to vote in lockstep on everything, that they would be able to assure that nothing would get done at the commission. And that’s exactly what they did. McGahn was appointed along with two other Republicans. From that time forward they have voted together and have not crossed party lines. There is an increased lack of willingness of even one Republican to vote to investigate a case.”
And in an email to the Washington Free Beacon she said that more complaints were made against Republicans but that “Republicans on the FEC refused to enforce those cases, both by refusing to hear them in a timely fashion, or by not voting to investigate them after a hearing.”
