WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) must pay fines after the Federal Election Commission (FEC) concluded that both groups improperly labeled payments made for the Russian dossier on then-candidate Donald Trump.
The FEC publicly announced the fines on Tuesday in a letter to the complainant, the Coolidge Reagan Foundation. The DNC and Clinton campaign agreed in February to pay the fines, but the decision has just been made public.
The election commission found that the Clinton campaign should have classified $175,000 in payments to Perkins Coie as opposition research, not as legal fees, as it did. The law firm acted as the intermediary for payments to opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which created the now-discredited dossier that alleged Donald Trump had unethical ties to Russia.
The FEC ordered the campaign to pay $8,000 in fines for violating the election disclosures regulations.
The DNC also improperly labeled $782,907.97 in payments to the law firm as legal fees, when they should have been labeled as opposition research, the FEC concluded. It must pay $105,000 in fines as a result of the finding by the election commission.
The Coolidge Reagan Foundation first filed the complaint with the FEC in September 2018, according to the Washington Examiner, which first reported the story.
“This may well be the first time that Hillary Clinton — one of the most evidently corrupt politicians in American history — has actually been held legally accountable, and I’m proud to have forced the FEC to do their job for once,” attorney Dan Backer, who represented the foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
“The Coolidge Reagan Foundation proved that with pluck and grit, Americans who stand with integrity can stand up to the Clinton machine and other corrupt political elites,” Backer said.
“Hillary Clinton and her cronies willfully engaged in the greatest political fraud in history — destroying our nation’s faith in the electoral process, and it’s high time they were held accountable,” Backer continued. “I hope this is only the beginning.”
The Democratic Party said the fines were paid to settle “silly complaints.”
“[W]e settled aging and silly complaints from the 2016 election about ‘purpose descriptions’ in our FEC report,” DNC spokesperson Daniel Wessel told Politico.
The FEC did not immediately act on the complaint from the foundation, however. It took legal action to prod an investigation into the matter.
The conservative foundation sued in May 2019 to force election commissioners to take action on the complaint, which it alleged the commission had not done. The foundation paused its lawsuit in August 2019 due to the investigation by Robert Mueller into allegations that Russia helped President Donald Trump win in 2016.
President Trump recently filed as $72 million defamation lawsuit against perpetrators of the hoax that he colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 presidential election.