A watchdog group argued Friday that federal regulators were wrong to dismiss allegations that Donald Trump's 2020 campaign hid spending from the public.
The Campaign Legal Center said in a lawsuit that the Federal Election Commission failed to enforce campaign finance disclosure requirements by not investigating the Trump campaign's use of two firms.
The Campaign Legal Center filed a lawsuit in March accusing the FEC of failing to respond to the group's July 2020 complaint.
The FEC wouldn't say anything about the lawsuit.
According to the original complaint and supplement, the Trump campaign "laundered upwards of three quarters of a billion dollars in 2020 campaign spending" through American Made Media Consultants and Parscale Strategy, a firm run by Brad Parscale.
Insider reported that the board of American Made Media Consultants included family members of Donald Trump and Mike Pence.
The FEC's failure to investigate the Trump campaign could embolden the former president and other candidates to repeat the same conduct, according to the lawsuit.
Lawyers for the Campaign Legal Center argued that the FEC's dismissal of the well-supported allegations encourages future campaigns to try to avoid transparency requirements by using a small number of reported vendors.
The group's complaint was dismissed by the FEC against the advice of the regulatory agency's own lawyer.
In April, the agency's general counsel recommended that the FEC find reason to believe that the Trump campaign broke election laws by using American Made Media Consultants and Parscale Strategy as pass-throughs.
The bipartisan commission was unable to agree on a way to investigate the alleged violations.
The dismissal extended Trump's "remarkable win streak" before the FEC, in which the commission received more than 40 complaints against the former president.
The FEC had done a grand total of zero investigations into Trump.
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