FEC chief says a GOP colleague blocked wide release of her foreign activity memo
In a politically apocalyptic year, with the threat of foreign interference in the 2020 election looming, one thing has been constant: You could set your watch to the Federal Election Commission’s digest showing up online.
The latest in election regulatory activity has published every Friday in 2019, and has posted in a similar frequency going back to 2009. The only recent disruption was the government shutdown that began around last Christmas.
That was until this Friday, after what FEC Chair Ellen L. Weintraub said was a Republican commissioner’s effort to block a draft memo on prohibited foreign national electoral activity from being included in the digest, which led to the entire digest withheld from the public.
But Weintraub found a way.
“Funny story,” she began in a Friday tweetstorm.
The Democratic chairwoman published the digest in piecemeal, with 57 tweets in all, including the draft foreign national prohibitions memo — all while calling out the commissioner who she said sought to block it from being widely publicized online.
“GOP FEC Commissioner Caroline Hunter took the altogether unprecedented step of objecting to its being added to the Digest and blocked publication of the whole,” Weintraub said, referring to the memo.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/28/elections-chief-says-gop-colleague-blocked-wide-release-her-foreign-activity-memo/
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