'Unsavory' DeSantis super PAC moves 'clearly in violation of campaign finance law': analysis

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is doing everything in his power to bend and dodge campaign finance laws in his effort to raise enough money to take on former President Donald Trump for the 2024 nomination, wrote Alexander Sammon for Slate.

The biggest way he is doing this, Sammon explained, is the laws governing super PACs.

"Super PACs, according to campaign finance law, are supposed to operate independently of campaigns and their candidates. That independence is what allows them to raise infinite amounts of money from corporations and the superrich, thanks to the conservative Supreme Court majority ruling in Citizens United," wrote Sammon. "But DeSantis’s super PACs aren’t just working closely with his campaign—they’re taking over entire core campaign functions. The super PAC supporting DeSantis’s national bid for president is the Never Back Down PAC: It is already organizing events for DeSantis on the campaign trail (a tactic favored by Carly Fiorina in the 2016 presidential Republican primary.) And it is structuring, staffing, and building out an entire ground game operation on DeSantis’s behalf, something seemingly unprecedented in a presidential primary."

By contrast, most super PACs simply run ad campaigns on behalf of a candidate, not run the candidate's voter outreach operation for them.

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However, it gets even more egregious than that, according to the report: "The most unprecedented thing, though—and this is where it goes from definitely unsavory and clearly in violation of the spirit of campaign finance law to possible actual transgression—is that transfer of $82.5 million from a state super PAC to DeSantis’s national super PAC. Candidates are not allowed to take money raised by a state level organization and spend it on federal races ... And yet, DeSantisworld moved a gargantuan sum that he raised as governor of Florida (for a PAC now called 'Empower Parents'), and reallocated it to fund expensive ad spots for his presidential run."

This is now the subject of a complaint from the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center.

This comes after a report earlier this month that both Trump and DeSantis have flouted another campaign finance rule, by abusing the "testing the waters" campaign period to hide large amounts of possibly unlawful expenditures.