FEC Chair Fired by Trump: "I'm just more determined than ever to keep speaking out"
Donald Trump fired Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub just 11 days into his return to office.
Just 11 days after returning to office, President Donald Trump fired Ellen Weintraub, chair of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), the independent agency responsible for overseeing federal campaign finance laws. Weintraub had been a vocal critic of Trump since his 2016 presidential run and a strong advocate for campaign finance enforcement since becoming a FEC commissioner in 2002. “The people that fired me did it in order to make me stop talking,” Weintraub told me. “I’m just more determined than ever to keep speaking out.”
Given the over $15 billion spent on 2024 federal elections, and our unhinged political culture, you’d think the agency tasked with monitoring complaints about potential campaign finance violations would be working at a frantic pace to keep up with all their investigations. The opposite is happening. The FEC’s follow-through rates are abysmal. FEC commissioners routinely vote against even opening investigations, which means that to a staggering degree no one is making sure that the deep-pocketed political actors trying to influence everything from climate regulation to gun laws are acting legally.
I spoke with Weintraub about the FEC’s failure to adequately investigate, how that fits into a broader Republican strategy to dismantle campaign finance regulations, and why it matters.
First, the basics of how the FEC was designed to operate. Stay with me, this is important: The FEC’s nonpartisan staff evaluates campaign finance violation complaints—like the one End Citizens United made last year against Elon Musk and Space X over its coordination with Trump’s campaign — and then recommends which complaints the FEC should investigate. The FEC was designed to have three Democratic and three Republican commissioners, under the assumption that its bipartisan composition would be a check on one party taking control and investigating its political enemies and not its allies. The commission needs four affirmative votes to advance an action, so on paper its design encourages compromise. Founded after Watergate, it’s supposed to curb partisan political corruption. In recent years, it hasn’t played out that way.
Last month, the Congressional Committee on House Administration, put out a massive staff report that describes how since the Citizens United ruling, the FEC has failed to adequately investigate claims and enforce laws related to the exact kind of illegal campaign activity it’s tasked with monitoring, like wealthy special interests coordinating illegally and foreign nationals trying to sway our elections. In just one example, since the 2010 Citizens United decision, FEC commissioners voted to open investigations related to illegal coordination in just twelve percent of the cases brought to them by their nonpartisan staff, according to the report.
The FEC has decided not to investigate Trump time and again. In 2019, End Citizens United filed a complaint alleging that the 2020 Trump campaign had violated super PAC regulations. The commissioners voted to close the case without an investigation. That fits the pattern. According to the Congressional staff report, “the FEC has closed 64 matters involving President Trump, his committees, or his family members. In 32 of those matters, the nonpartisan staff recommended reason to believe some violation had occurred… In all 32 matters, the Republican FEC Commissioners blocked any investigation into potential violations of the law.” In other words, as the report summarizes, “President Trump is 32-0 in matters before the FEC.”
The problem long precedes Trump, Weintraub told me. The major turning point came in 2008, when a new slate of three Republican commissioners was appointed and Republicans started using the FEC as a tool to defang campaign finance laws writ large. “It was a whole new dynamic,” Weintraub explained. “They all voted in lockstep, which had not been the practice before.” The newly appointed Republicans continually voted against investigating claims and enforcing the law.
“This was a strategy,” Weintraub told me. “The issue of campaign finance had become partisan, and Republican commissioners didn't really want to enforce the law because they didn't believe in that law.”
She remembers several instances of the Democratic commissioners wanting to pursue claims against Democrats and all the Republican commissioners voting no. This made the Republican commissioners appear above partisanship, but in reality, they were advancing just a different kind of partisanship—one ideologically opposed to campaign finance regulation. “We had quite a number of years when we just couldn't get anything done because on any important issues we ended up in a three-three deadlock.”
“The idea was to make campaign finance law unenforceable,” Weintraub said. By rendering the FEC ineffectual, Republicans could effectively void campaign finance laws without having to get rid of those laws through Congress or the courts.
While campaign regulations can seem abstract, as we all know, runaway political spending has real-world consequences, too many to name. In just a couple instances, anti-abortion groups spent enormous sums to overturn Roe, and conservative billionaires spent billions to popularize climate change denial and opposition to commonsense regulation. As Weintraub told me, “The public may not know where the dark money's coming from, but I can assure you the politicians know where it's coming from.”
That’s why, after the FEC dismissed its complaint against the 2020 Trump campaign without investigation, End Citizens United sued the FEC. In 2023, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit decided in favor of End Citizens United, saying that the FEC had improperly dismissed claims against Trump’s campaign.
End Citizens United’s current lawsuit against the FEC over a dismissed complaint about then-Florida governor Rick Scott’s campaign’s coordination with a super PAC could have massive implications. The case is currently being considered by the DC Circuit and a win would set a crucial precedent for campaign finance enforcement by making the FEC do its job. And yes, these cases drag on for years – End Citizens United first filed this complaint in 2018 – and that’s on purpose: The campaigns that break the law often use every tactic they can to delay hearings until the complaint is no longer timely, making the cases moot.
Forcing the courts to evaluate FEC complaints is the best existing strategy to ensure that someone neutral will interpret campaign finance laws since the FEC is falling down on the job, Weintraub told me. Every court ruling like the one End Citizens United won in 2023 reinforces the guardrails, which we need now more than ever.
Firing Weintraub was more proof, as if we needed it, that Trump is willing to obliterate norms and ignore laws. Without Weintraub, the commission doesn’t have a quorum to advance investigations into Trump or anyone. Moreover, as Weintraub told me, “My firing, and the firing of a bunch of other people I know, was designed and intended and is being received as intimidation. To issue a warning, not very subtly, that [the government] can fire people if you don't toe the line, if you try to speak the truth.” In the face of this, Weintraub said, “We just need to have people who refuse to be intimidated and who stand up for what’s right.”
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