\n

In an April statement to The New York Times regarding a different matter<\/a>, the F.E.C.\u2019s chairwoman, Dara Lindenbaum, a Democrat, and its vice chairman, Sean J. Cooksey, a Republican, said: \u201cWe take this agency\u2019s enforcement and transparency mission seriously, as do all of our colleagues. Without commenting on any specific case, Commissioners assess each enforcement matter on its merits, and we reach agreement in nearly 90 percent of them. Any claim that the Commission is \u2018toothless\u2019 or that its bipartisan structure prevents it from fulfilling its mission is misinformed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as the F.E.C. sought to respond to Mr. Santos\u2019s actions with its usual enforcement mechanisms, those tools were not on their own able to address the extent of the brazen misconduct he has been accused of. In the months before Mr. Santos\u2019s election, the F.E.C. sent his campaign a series of \u201crequests for additional information\u201d \u2014 commonplace inquiries seeking details about transactions not fully accounted for in a committee\u2019s regular filings with the commission.<\/p>\n

The F.E.C. does not have the power to look in bank accounts and must take campaign finance disclosure reports at face value. Unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, it is not a regulatory agency \u2014 its primary mission, laid out in its most recent annual report, is to provide transparency and \u201cpromote compliance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some questions about Mr. Santos\u2019s campaign remain unanswered. His campaign\u2019s filings are filled with suspicious expenditures \u2014 for example, some of the dozens of charges pegged at $199.99, cents below the federal threshold that requires receipts \u2014 and outright omissions, such as hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending that was never accounted for.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, we don\u2019t know what we don\u2019t know,\u201d said Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance expert who previously worked at the Campaign Legal Center. \u201cThe bottom line here is that the only thing the F.E.C. sees, in most instances, at first glance, are the campaign finance disclosure reports,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if someone is smart enough to simply lie about what they are using it for,\u201d then it can go overlooked, he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an April statement to The New York Times regarding a different matter, the F.E.C.\u2019s chairwoman, Dara Lindenbaum, a Democrat, and its vice chairman, Sean J. Cooksey, a Republican, said: \u201cWe take this agency\u2019s enforcement and transparency mission seriously, as do all of our colleagues. Without commenting on any specific case, Commissioners assess each enforcement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[6037,6239,929,5951,994,5763,2386,16825,10693],"class_list":["post-12636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-abuse","tag-campaign","tag-easy","tag-finance","tag-george","tag-laws","tag-reveals","tag-santos","tag-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lsd.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}