The Federal Election Commission is deadlocked, will not punish Trump US and world news

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Federal Election Commission has decided not to take action against former President Donald Trump after commissioners came to a standstill over whether his campaign violated the law by masking how she spent money during the 2020 campaign.

In a letter Monday, the FEC reported the results to the company’s legal center. The nonprofit group first filed a lawsuit against Trump in 2020, alleging that his company “laundered” hundreds of millions of costs from mandatory public disclosure by directing payments through companies that were linked to his former CEO Brad Parscale.

This practice has long been considered against the law, but in recent years the FEC, which is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, has often come to a standstill in making important decisions like this.

This has in fact set a number of new precedents that are gradually repealing the law governing the use of money in national politics. It is unclear what legal justification was used to justify this decision.

Ada Noti, a former FEC lawyer who is now the company’s vice president of legal center and director of legal affairs, said the commission would not publish its legal case for several weeks. He said the appeal would depend on more details.

“It depends on what’s in the case file,” Noti said. “We only have a dead end message.”

In a similar case in March FEC found a probable cause that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 and the Democratic National Committee violated the election law by distorting the cost of research that eventually became infamous to Steele’s dossier.

In that case, Clinton and DNC agreed to pay $ 113,000 for the settlement not acknowledging that they had broken the law to avoid further legal costs.

During the 2020 campaign, most payments by Trump’s election committees were made to American Made Media Consultants, which received at least $ 780 million between 2018 and 2021, according to FEC records. Another firm, Parscale Strategy, raised at least $ 32 million during the period, records show.

The company said American Made Media Consultants was created to directly purchase advertising – and save money without relying on an intermediary. But instead the company acted as a cost clearing center, still using third-party vendors it allegedly set up to avoid, the complaint said.

In at least two cases, firms owned by Trump’s digital director Gary Kobe seemed to have been the firm hired to buy or develop digital communications products, although there is no record of Kobe’s payments in the disclosure of Kobe’s campaign finance. to the complaint.

Meanwhile, the Parscale Strategy has been used to pay salaries to some Trump re-election officials, including Lara Trump, the wife of Trump’s son Eric, and Kimberly Gilfoyle, the bride of Trump’s eldest son Don Jr., the complaint said.

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