According to a report from the Daily Beast, the Federal Election Commission is putting pressure on Congress -- practically "begging," according to the Beast's Roger Sollenberger -- to shut down methods employed by Donald Trump and other lawmakers to milk their followers for campaign cash.
Specifically the "recurring donation" scam the former president has deployed and still uses, after losing his re-election bid in 2020 to President Joe Biden.
According to a New York Times investigation in 2021, the former president was facing a cash crunch in 2020 before the election and made changes to his campaign's donation page that opted online donors into making automatic weekly recurring contributions by "prechecking a box on its digital donation forms," unless the supporter unchecked the box to avoid halt the recurring payment.
That, in turn, led to the former president refunding over $13 million after the report came out.
Now the FEC wants Congress to step in and ban the practice.
As Sollenberger wrote, "It’s not the first time the FEC has floated many of those same proposals, which include requests to shut legal loopholes related to the personal use of political funds, so-called 'scam PACs,' and straw donor schemes. The agency asked Congress to put more muscle behind those laws last year, too, but lawmakers seem even more averse to the idea than the notoriously sluggish FEC, whose routine partisan deadlocks over enforcement have led critics to declare the agency 'broken.'"
According to Saurav Ghosh of the Campaign Legal Center, "It’d be great if they took action before the 2024 election, because it’s fair to think these problems will rear their head again.”
The report goes on to note that Trump is not the only perpetrator, and the scam flourished through the recent midterm election.
"Throughout the midterms, political committees continued barraging potential donors with controversial fundraising requests with pre-checked boxes to make contributions recur automatically," Sollenberger wrote. "That’s despite widespread previous reports that 2020 donors—many of them elderly—had complained that the language of those solicitations misled them, claiming they weren’t aware at the time that they were authorizing repeat withdrawals. Many donors have said it’s difficult to cancel the action or get their money back."
According to a draft from the FEC, "Commission staff are regularly contacted by individuals who have discovered recurring contributions to political committees have been charged to their credit card accounts or deducted from their checking accounts. In many cases, the contributors do not recall authorizing recurring contributions. Often, these contributors have attempted unsuccessfully to cancel the recurring transactions with the political committee prior to contacting FEC staff.”
The report adds, "While members of Congress have demonstrated bipartisan appetite to snuff out scam PACs, federal legislative efforts haven’t made headway. That leaves enforcement to the Justice Department and state and local authorities, who dedicate their limited resources only to the most obscene violators. The FEC, meanwhile, can only abide by its mandate, which isn’t currently explicit enough to close the loophole."
You can read more here.
