News Clips

The investigation must follow the evidence wherever it leads. The American people are entitled to answers and accountability. With the approaching elections, Americans are closely watching how Congress will respond to this latest effort to subvert the rule of law.

“Denials and tweets in all caps do not make campaign finance violations go away,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause.

“I just think it again affirms what we filed in our complaint; that it sounds like Donald Trump knew about the hush money payment to McDougal before the election,” said Common Cause Chief of Strategy and External Affairs Stephen Spaulding. “I just think this is more of another log on the fire that these are campaign finance violations and that the thread continues to unravel.”

There are solutions to the problems of mass incarceration, and citizens in more and more states are mustering the political will to bring them about.

“There was a tremendous public outcry against this merger,” said Michael Copps, a former FCC commissioner who opposed media consolidation and now serves as a senior adviser to Common Cause, an opponent of the Sinclair deal. “How much influence it had on Ajit Pai, I don’t really know. I think public outcry did make a difference.”

Put differently, as Common Cause’s Paul S. Ryan told me via email, “If the earlier reporting that AMI consulted with Cohen (an ‘agent’ of candidate Trump) before making the payment to McDougal is correct, then AMI’s payment to McDougal was a political expenditure ‘coordinated’ with Trump.” He continued, “Coordinated expenditures are treated as in-kind contributions under campaign finance law and corporations are prohibited from contributing to federal candidates, so AMI’s payment to McDougal [would be] an illegal corporate contribution to Trump.” Indeed, this was the basis for complaints that Common Cause filed earlier this year with the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission.