News Clips

“We have a fox guarding the henhouse situation when it comes to the Congress looking into its own members,” said Beth Rotman, national director of money in politics and ethics with Common Cause, one of the groups that filed the complaint against Loeffler. “It’s a huge problem.”

In an interview with S. V. Date, of HuffPost, Paul S. Ryan, a campaign-finance lawyer at the watchdog group Common Cause, used more colloquial language. “It’ll be a slush fund,” he said. Whereas the rules governing campaign pacs are fairly strict, the rules for leadership pacs are scandalously lax. OpenSecrets notes that some politicians use such funds to make campaign donations to other candidates in their party. Trump could end up doing this, too, but he also has many other options, including directing some of the donations to himself and his children. “Trump could decide to pay himself $1 million a year out of this fund,” Ryan noted. “That’s legal. He could pay Don Jr. and Ivanka, if he wanted to.”

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the watchdog group Common Cause, said Barr’s comments that the DOJ was unable to find substantive evidence of fraud could potentially put him in Trump’s crosshairs.    “The president seems to fire anybody who states a fact that he does not agree with,” Albert said.   In its assessment of the November 3 election, Common Cause said it had uncovered instances of routine Election Day problems such as malfunctioning machines and long lines but no evidence of fraud.    Albert criticized Barr for toeing Trump’s line on voter fraud before belatedly stating the obvious.     “The attorney general has for the past month continued to help the president undermine people's confidence in the election, so I'm not going to give him a prize for telling the truth when he's told it a month late,” Albert said in an interview with VOA.  

Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, has written to the DOJ, Federal Elections Commission and the Southern District of New York asking for investigations into campaign finance violations pertaining to Trump’s hush money payments to two women and over the president’s request that Ukraine investigate Biden for corruption. Ryan said federal officials should feel duty-bound to investigate even when Trump is out of office, but said he fears the political pressure to look the other way will be too great. “I don’t think politics should play a role, but it probably will,” Ryan said. “I suspect, against my own wishes, that a Biden DOJ will probably not pursue crimes against his predecessor. We have a history in this country of presidents looking the other way and letting bygones be bygones. That’s not good for democracy in terms of election law and future precedent. But Biden may find it necessary for democracy writ large to try and move the country forward.”

“It’ll be a slush fund,” said Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance lawyer with Common Cause. “Trump could decide to pay himself $1 million a year out of this fund. That’s legal. He could pay [his children] Don Jr. and Ivanka, if he wanted to. It’s pretty clear that this is a classic bait-and-switch scheme.”

“The General Assembly won’t do it— we understand the motivations why they won’t do it,” said Julia Vaughn, Common Cause Indiana’s policy director. “So we’re creating this parallel, this shadow, process that will demonstrate to Hoosiers and the Legislature alike that there is a way to do this in the public interest, out in the open so that everybody can see.”