Daily Beast: Mercers Throw Steve Bannon Under the Bus in Election Probe

When federal election officials announced this month that they closed an investigation into the Trump campaign allegedly coordinating with foreign nationals, they may have unintentionally opened the door to another case.

On Nov. 4, the FEC’s office of general counsel published its final report on its three-year investigation into whether a number of political committees, including the Trump campaign, had illegally coordinated with Cambridge Analytica’s foreign employees in the 2014 and 2016 elections.

Cambridge, a British data firm which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, employed Steve Bannon as the director of U.S. operations before he became a top adviser to Trump. The firm was widely accused by watchdogs, employee whistleblowers, and governments around the world of illegally harvesting Facebook data for “psychological profiling” services it provided to help campaigns target digital ads—allegations the company denies.

The FEC wanted to find out whether Cambridge’s campaign work included foreign nationals not just providing services but helping campaigns make decisions, which is illegal.

But after agency investigators reported they had found “reason to believe” there was illegal coordination in both 2014 and 2016, the Republican FEC commissioners voted to proceed only with the 2014 case—ignoring the allegations involving Trump. The probes were then stymied by a slate of evasive respondents, and the lawyers eventually recommended dropping both investigations. …

Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, filed the initial 2018 complaint against Cambridge and Trump. He also blamed the GOP.

“It’s more of the same, with the FEC’s Republican commissioners dragging their feet, allowing the statute of limitations to expire, and hobbling or blocking investigations entirely,” Ryan said. “The result is no enforcement of the law.”