Don McGahn. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Donald
Trump's White House Counsel Is Proud "Architect" of America's Corrupt
Big Money Politics
By Jon Schwarz, The
Intercept
04 December 16
Jon
McGahn, soon to be Donald Trump’s White House counsel, bears as much
responsibility as any single person for turning America’s campaign finance
system into something akin to a gigantic, clogged septic tank.
From
2008 to 2013, McGahn was one of the six members of the Federal Election
Commission, the government agency in charge of civil enforcement of campaign
finance laws. While there, he led a GOP campaign that essentially ground
enforcement of election laws to a halt.
“I’ve
always thought of McGahn’s appointment as an FEC commissioner as analogous to
appointing an anarchist to be chief of police,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice
president at Common Cause. “He’s largely responsible for destroying the FEC as
a functioning law enforcement agency, and seemingly takes great pride in this
fact. McGahn has demonstrated a much stronger interest in expanding the
money-in-politics swamp than draining it.”
Elaine
Weintraub, a current FEC commissioner, overlapped with McGahn’s entire tenure.
McGahn and his two fellow GOP appointees, she recalled, possessed a “very strong
ideological opposition to campaign finance laws in general.”
This
ideology — that essentially all limits on campaign contributions and spending
are unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment — was developed by a
loose affiliation of conservative lawyers including McGahn, beginning in the late 1990s.
It started bearing fruit a decade later with a series of court decisions,
including the Citizens United ruling in 2010. McGahn’s page on his law firm’s website describes him as
one of the “architects of the campaign finance revolution.”
McGahn’s
perspective manifested itself consistently at the FEC. Previously, when the
agency received outside complaints alleging violations of the law, its general
counsel’s office was responsible for conducting a preliminary examination of
the issues and then making a recommendation to the commission members about the
legal issues involved and whether to proceed with a full investigation.
McGahn
was so extreme that he
attempted to block the general counsel’s staff from reading news reports, using
Google or looking at a campaign’s web site without prior authorization from a
majority of the FEC commissioners. Had the measure passed, because the FEC has
six members at full capacity and no more than three can be from one political
party, Republicans would effectively have controlled what FEC lawyers were
allowed to read.
McGahn
also attempted to prevent the FEC’s staff from doing something it had done as a
matter of course in the past: respond to requests for internal records from the
Justice Department, which is responsible for criminal prosecution of campaign
finance crimes, without formal approval from the commissioners. “He just did
not want us to have a more cooperative relationship with the Justice
Department,” Weintraub said.
McGahn’s
losing battle nevertheless led the agency’s general counsel at the time to
resign in frustration.
Now,
as Trump’s White House lawyer, McGahn will provide crucial advice on the
nomination of judges, including to the Supreme Court. While Trump has
criticized Citizens United, and called the Super PACs that sprang up in its
wake “horrible” and a “total phony deal,” McGahn is a vociferous defender of
the ruling.
Trump praised McGahn as
possessing “a deep understanding of constitutional law.”
A
White House’s lawyer essentially serves as the president’s conscience, and is
in charge of the ethics rules. “I was hoping that the sea of conflicts of
interest that surround Donald Trump and many of his appointees would convince
Trump that he needs to pursue sweeping ethics reforms, especially for incoming
administration officials,” said Craig Holman of Public Citizen. “The selection
of McGahn to be the chief ethics cop strongly suggests the new administration
is likely to be scandal-ridden and eventually perceived by the public as
business as usual.”
Ryan
considers McGahn to be “a very skilled lawyer who knows campaign finance and
ethics laws like the back of his hand” and hence will give Trump accurate
advice. Therefore, says Ryan, “when President-elect Trump engages in any
questionable ethics practices, we’ll know he’s doing so with full knowledge of
ethics standards. President-elect Trump has no excuses.”
McGahn
began his career at Squire Patton Boggs, a famed D.C. law firm and lobby shop.
The late Tommy Boggs, one of its cheerfully mercenary name partners, said that
the firm’s moral code was “We pick our clients by taking the first one who
comes in the door.”
In
1999, McGahn became chief counsel of the National Republican Congressional
Committee, which coordinates campaigns for GOP members of the House of
Representatives. While there he also represented House majority leader Tom
DeLay of Texas in investigations into some of DeLay’s incredibly labyrinthian fundraising
schemes.
One of
these schemes led to DeLay being convicted of money laundering and sentenced to
prison. (The conviction was later overturned.) But McGahn helped DeLay escape
any consequences for another, in which the U.S. Family Network, a dark money
nonprofit close to DeLay, received $1 million that
DeLay’s former chief of staff told others came from Russian oil and gas
executives. According to the president of U.S. Family Network, DeLay’s chief of
staff said this money was specifically intended to buy his support for a 1998
International Monetary Fund bailout of the Russian economy. DeLay voted for the
bill but later claimed the U.S. Family Network donation had nothing to do with
it.
There’s
no question that Americans loathe the
way big money controls the U.S. political system. Many Trump
supporters presumably believed they were voting to halt it in its tracks.
Instead, all evidence suggests that Don McGahn will now be stomping on the
accelerator.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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