News Clips

“This provision helps ensure President Trump and his family can’t benefit from coronavirus pandemic, but there are some loopholes,” said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, an advocacy group that works closely with House committee staffers. “They could benefit in indirect ways.”

We showed these tax records to Paul Seamus Ryan of the watchdog group Common Cause. "When casinos are giving money to one of these groups right before an election that the casino has a vested interest in, the governor's race, and then the DGA or the RGA spends the money in that race, that's a pretty clear connection."

“He had the wealth to give away money for years to build friends, to build political allies, to build relationships, in ways that the average American doesn’t have, can’t do. That’s a huge advantage,” said Paul S. Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, a government watchdog group.

“They aren’t going to criticize him in his 2020 run because they don’t want to jeopardize receiving financial support from him in the future,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause.

“We are clearly dealing with a very wealthy individual who has the ability to build goodwill among the public, among specific political actors, in a way that will benefit his campaign,” said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “Where things could get tricky or legally problematic is if he starts, or is in fact, using his foundation to build support and goodwill for his campaign. Trump seemingly ran afoul of those laws, hopefully Bloomberg will avoid those violations.”The fact that he is able to appeal to potential voters by spending his vast personal wealth on issues they care about, Ryan said, is “another example” of how billionaires have an advantage in elections.

Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Washington-based watchdog group Common Cause, said if Halle's tweet was instead a private message to an outside group, and the outside group made an ad buy based on the information in the private message, then the Buttigieg campaign and the outside spender's activities would "arguably meet" the "material involvement" standard under the FEC's multi-part test.This would violate federal laws.But in this case, because Halle had tweeted the message publicly instead of sending it as a private message to a super PAC, it's not necessarily covered by the FEC rules."In other words, if a candidate does all of their coordinating with outside groups in public view, there’s no illegal coordination under this FEC regulation," Ryan said. "It’s a pretty big hole in the law."