During the 2008 presidential campaign season, I wrote about the unfortunate incentive for political opponents and their supporters to use the FEC’s complaint process to harass opposing candidates. (See "Using campaign finance law as an electoral sword .") Last week, the FEC made public an apparent example of that phenomenon.
Specifically, BNA’s "Money & Politics Report" ran a story last Thursday entitled "FEC Deadlocks on Enforcement Matter Charging Romney Got Illegal Contribution." The "news" highlighted by the story was that the FEC had deadlocked once again in party line votes, thus failing to take any action on a complaint against the Romney campaign and one of his supporters.
But the real news in the story was buried much further down and mentioned almost in passing in describing the complaint. The report noted: "The FEC did release a copy of the original complaint from Greg Sabine of Brockton, Mass., which cited news stories questioning whether [a] charter flight of Romney supporters [to a ‘national call day’ fundraising event] constituted an illegal [in-kind] contribution."
Now that description piqued my interest, so I took a look at the FEC complaint, and then did a quick Google search on the complainant’s name and "Brockton." What I found, was what I expected to find — a personally unsupported complaint filed by someone who appeared to have an axe to grind against Romney.
First, the official complaint amounts to nothing more than one page and eight paragraphs, which is supported only by two newspaper articles, one of which doesn’t even concern the events cited by the complainant as "an apparent violation of federal election law by the Romney for President campaign and one of its top fundraisers." In other words, the complainant had no personal knowledge — other than reading a newspaper report — of anything that needed to be brought to the FEC’s attention.
Second, the most rudimentary of Google searches appeared to reveal the complainant to be no friend, but rather an enemy, of Romney. The complainant — using the same name and always signing his posts with either his full address or "Brockton, Massachusetts (or Mass. Or MA) — had commented on several websites including Townhall.com and GreggJackson.com, indicating his disagreement with and distaste for Romney, who was formerly the governor of the complainant’s state and then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
For instance, in commenting on Gregg Jackson’s post taking Ann Coulter to task for endorsing Romney’s presidential bid, the complainant wrote:
"We must be ever careful not to drink in the public adulation so much that we get caught up in self-aggrandizement, as Ann Coulter has. With her U. Michigan ‘LAW’ degree, for example, she should have quickly grasped Gregg’s lucid explication of the Massachusetts Constitution, which Mitt Romney violated by single-handedly instituting his counterfeit ‘marriages.’ But no. Instead she naively fell for Romney’s money, prestige and ‘aura.’ … And how can such a ‘pro-lifer’ give the rich ex governor a pass on his Romneybort healthcare plan? Amazing! No, friends, Ann will not be up for this challenge."
Similarly, in several comments posted concerning columns published on Townhall.com, the complainant continually brought up Romney.
Posting in response to a column entitled "Mitt’s Vietnam Flip-Flop: His Most Disturbing Yet," the complainant called Romney a "LAWBREAKER" and wrote:
"HE IS THE ACTUAL ‘FATHER[‘] OF SAME-SEX ‘MARRIAGE.’ Don’t believe me, GOOGLE ‘THE MITT ROMNEY DECEPTION,’ Brian Camenker’s outstanding – true – research on how Romney violated his sworn oath and illegally instituted gay ‘marriage’ here in Massachusetts."
Commenting on another column entitled "Same Sex ‘Marriage’: Illegal in All Fifty States," the complaint wrote:
"The next generation of leaders must know the truth about Gov. Mitt Romney’s counte[r]feit marriages, not to mention his 50 dollar abortions."
Anyway, you get the idea.
The point here is not that there can be no legitimate debate about whether the there was adequate "reason to believe" for the FEC to pursue an investigation of the Romney campaign and his supporter for flying friends and family from Utah to Massachusetts for a fundraising event. (Although I would point out, as did the attorney for the Romney campaign, that it’s commonplace for fundraising attendees to bear their own travel costs, and that there was no allegation that the Romney campaign was in any way involved in arranging or coordinating the travel here.) Rather, the point is that this complaint — like too many others — sure seems to have been motivated not by any civic duty to inform the authorities of a possible violation, but as a means to punish a political enemy of the complainant.
That’s why I applaud three of the Commissioners for refusing to move forward on this complaint regardless of whether that resulted in a party-line deadlock or not. Indeed, as several of us in the election law bar recently explained in comments and testimony about the FEC’s policies and procedures, it would sure be nice if the FEC raised the bar — or at least more rigorously enforced the current standards — for valid complaints so that those who want to exercise their political rights can do so without so much fear of retribution through the FEC’s broken complaint process.
