Trump-appointed elections official wants to eliminate transparency for campaign finance complaints

A Trump-appointed member of the Federal Election Commission is proposing a new policy change, according to The Daily Beast: end the practice of the agency confirming the existence of ethics complaints against candidates.

"Allen Dickerson, an attorney appointed to the commission by former President Donald Trump in 2020, asked the agency on Monday to order its press office to stop confirming complaints," reported Corbin Bolies. "'The Commission’s Press Office has reportedly had a consistent practice, dating to the agency’s creation, of confirming the existence of complaints in response to press inquiries,' Dickerson wrote in the memo. 'Despite having been made aware of this practice at least sixteen years ago, the Commission has failed to provide the Press Office with formal instructions concerning its confidentiality obligations under the [Federal Election Campaign] Act.'"

Dickerson has previously praised the Supreme Court's controversial decision in Citizens United v. FEC, and previously worked for a group, the Institute for Free Speech, that sought to tear down campaign finance and ethics laws.

"An FEC spokesperson wrote in an email to The Daily Beast that its current policy is to confirm the existence of a complaint 'if the requestor can name both the complainant and the respondent,'" said the report. "According to Dickerson, however, the commission has been violating the law’s confidentiality clause since its inception. The clause dictates that 'no complaint filed with the Commission, nor any notification sent by the Commission, nor any investigation conducted by the Commission, nor any findings made by the Commission shall be made public by the Commission or by any person or entity without the written consent of the respondent with respect to whom the complaint was filed, the notification sent, the investigation conducted, or the finding made.'"

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However, according to Campaign Legal Center expert Adav Noti, that clause does not prohibit the FEC from disclosing whether a complaint exists; it simply prohibits the FEC from revealing certain details about it.

The FEC has faced difficulties in enforcing the law in recent years, as the commissioners, who by law are divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, routinely deadlock over enforcement. At certain times, Republicans have even blocked the commission from running at all by leaving enough vacancies to deny it a quorum.