News Clips

Common Cause has always maintained that Trump cheated en route to winning the 2016 election by violating campaign finance laws. Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and fixer, was sentenced in 2018 for, in part, orchestrating payments to help to cover up Trump’s alleged affairs. Now the other big player, AMI, has been fined. But to date there’s been no accountability for Trump. Here’s the backstory on Trump’s alleged crimes and why they matter.

“With this limit struck down, officeholders can raise money after an election and that money effectively goes straight into their pockets in the form of a loan repayment,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy & litigation at Common Cause. “This is the most potentially corrupting money in all of politics.”

Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a good government advocacy group, said in an interview that while Ms. Farhadian Weinstein would not have been required to disclose the meeting publicly in the district attorney’s race, the information was “certainly relevant to the job she’s applying for.” “It’s information that voters will want to consider, and it’s up to them to decide how this factors into their ultimate choice,” Ms. Lerner said.

“I hope it sends a really strong message to Democrats in Congress, especially in the Senate, that these fights are especially important. Democracy is literally at risk and you have to do absolutely everything you possibly can do,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “This wasn’t Democrats shutting down the rules. This was them using every single thing to their advantage, taking a stand to protect voting rights.”

Paul S. Ryan, Common Cause’s vice president for policy and litigation, hailed the news as “a win for democracy.” But he argued that the FEC’s “failure to hold former-President Trump and his campaign accountable for this violation lays bare the dysfunction at the FEC.” He noted that the decision comes on the heels of a similar decision by the agency to drop an inquiry into whether Trump violated campaign finance laws when Cohen paid adult-film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 in the days leading up to the 2016 election. “The agency has again shown itself incapable of fully enforcing the campaign finance laws passed by Congress,” Ryan said in a statement.

"The Texas Democratic Party is holding back the levy with a temporary band-aid, but they don’t have the resources to be able to hold it back permanently," said Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for good-government watchdog Common Cause.