News Clips

Paul S. Ryan, a vice president for the good governance group Common Cause, said he’s seen all sorts of shenanigans in a long career immersed in campaign finance issues. But this one’s a true head-scratcher, he said. “It is odd,” Ryan said. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years and this is a first for me.”

“A lot of people close to Donald Trump are getting rich off of his campaign,” said Paul Ryan, a campaign finance legal expert at the watchdog group Common Cause. “They don’t want donors to know that they’re getting rich. Because, at the end of the day, it’s donor money.”

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, said “with this much money flowing around the last thing you want is for it to all go to people who just happen to be politically well connected as opposed to people who are out of a job without health care or have their business shutting down.”

“The recent oil boom in New Mexico has unleashed more than an ocean of oil and gas money: It has unleashed a gusher of campaign contributions, a flurry of lobbyists offering expensive dinners and a mammoth public relations offensive financed by one of the largest and most powerful professional associations in the state,” Common Cause Executive Director Heather Ferguson said in a statement Tuesday.

Bloomberg’s campaign presents “novel challenges” because it was funded entirely with his own money, according to Beth Rotman, campaign finance expert at Common Cause, a nonpartisan good government nonprofit. This makes the $18 million donation through his campaign look like a new way to evade the contribution limits put in place to deter corruption and ensure equality in political campaigns. “It’s very troubling that Bloomberg appears to be evading the federal contribution limits of an individual to a party committee,” Rotman said. Common Cause is considering filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission challenging this donation.

"As long as Team Bloomberg doesn't talk to Team Biden about what it's doing -- how it's spending Bloomberg's fortune to support Biden -- it's not subject to any limits at all," said Paul Ryan, a veteran campaign-finance lawyer who is now vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause.