Proud to be the only one providing actual analysis of legality in these comments so far 🫡
“I don’t think most campaign finance lawyers believe that this is a best reading of the law,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA’s law school, told CNN on Tuesday of the Trump campaign’s argument. But, he added, “that doesn’t mean it can’t get tied up in FEC proceedings for years.”
Veteran Republican election lawyer Charlie Spies, who briefly served as the RNC’s general counsel earlier this year, argued recently that the Biden-Harris team must be formally nominated by their party before any money could be shifted.
“If President Biden is committed to passing the torch to his vice president, and wants to be able to seed her campaign with the current Biden for President campaign war chest, he’ll first have to become his party’s legal nominee,” Spies wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal before Biden’s exit from the race.
But other campaign finance experts disagree. And Federal Election Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum, a Democrat viewed as a swing vote on the evenly divided commission, has said Harris could access what Biden raised through the campaign committee because it is registered for both the president and vice president.