Republicans and reform-conscious Democrats on the Federal Election Commission have finally voted to put an end to open-ended investigations by agency attorneys that are always costly and sometimes politically charged.
In a commonsense proposal, a majority of the commissioners this month decided to take control of all investigations into election fraud, a responsibility that over time they had ceded to FEC attorneys.
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The move comes in the wake of some high-profile embarrassments and revelations of investigations by FEC staff that some commissioners didn’t even know about.
“The law is clear that the commission is the investigator and its legal staff assists the commission in conducting its investigations,” said former FEC Chairman Lee Goodman, now an elections attorney.
“Historically, there are many examples where the staff has treated the commission’s decision to open an investigation into a limited topic as an open-ended fishing expedition into highly sensitive political associations exceeding the scope intended by the commission, often without the commission’s knowledge. So the commission had good reason to institute controls over the conduct of its own investigations,” he told Secrets.
Trey Trainor, a commissioner appointed by former President Donald Trump, advocated the reform. He said, “Based upon substantial legal concerns with the FEC’s conduct in the recent past, this new guideline for how investigations will be conducted in the future is very necessary. I supported this bipartisan policy because we must stem the tide of making the process at the FEC the punishment for alleged violations.”
In an interview, he said the new plan will require regular updates from investigators about their inquiries and force commissioners to decide if the investigations should continue.
In the past, he said, some investigations were pointless, such as issuing subpoenas to Facebook or Google to find out who might have spent $150 or less on political ads. And sometimes investigations linger, costing those being targeted their life savings.
He also cited a trend in which liberal groups get the FEC to open cases against conservatives based on news stories that turn out to be bogus but drag out for months and years.
Agency investigators, he said, are sometimes “overly zealous with regard to wanting to find violations of the law. I think that a lot of times, the perspective of doing justice gets thrown out the window because they can’t see the forest for the trees,” he said.
The reform was pushed through with the help of new Democratic blood, FEC Chairwoman Dara Lindenbaum and Shana Broussard.
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“It’s a new era,” Trainor said. He said that Lindenbaum, for example, “comes from the world of representing people who have gone through extensive investigations for activity that is so mundane that, you know, you’re sitting out there as a lawyer working with these people, and they’re like, ‘Why am I being investigated?’”
What’s more, he said, some cases are just a waste of money. “For me, it’s also a waste of taxpayer resources, too. I mean, there are bigger fish to fry out there,” Trainor said.
