A Republican commissioner on the Federal Election Commission who has previously opposed efforts for government transparency asked the commission to end its practice of confirming FEC complaints, according to an internal memo.
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.
“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.”
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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.”
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.”
That, however, does not apply to whether a complaint exists at all, said Adav Noti, the legal director at the Campaign Legal Center. The CLC filed a letter with the FEC on Wednesday in opposition to the proposal, noting its incongruence with the Federal Election Campaign Act and its political implications.
Noti told The Daily Beast that the law only mandates that notices sent to complaint respondents throughout an investigation remain confidential, not whether a complaint itself is filed. He said the practice is particularly useful when determining, for instance, whether a political candidate follows through with a threat to file an FEC complaint against an opponent—leaving public suspicion lingering with no ability for the FEC to refute a potentially false claim.
“Under this proposal, there would be no way to know that,” he told The Daily Beast. “No one would ever be able to know if that was true.”
Dickerson, whose appointment passed the Senate 49-47 in 2020, was previously the legal director for the Institute for Free Speech, a non-profit organization “dedicated solely to protecting First Amendment political speech rights” that has often criticized current campaign finance laws.
He hailed the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision that obscured corporations’ political donations as righteous in a 2011 report and opposed multiple legislative efforts on a federal and state level for corporations to disclose donors. Since his appointment, which included a yearlong stint as FEC Chairman in 2022, he has sought to reverse certain agency practices for fear they violate the Federal Election Campaign Act.
The Commission will take up the proposal during its next open meeting on April 19.
