It appears that the Federal Election Commission (FEC), a federal agency that, as its name suggests, deals with campaign finance issues among contenders for federal office, is examining how money in the Trump campaign’s recount fund tied to the 2020 election was used.
Repositories of funds ostensibly designated for recounts also recently came under scrutiny in the context of the unsuccessful campaign for Senate from Herschel Walker, who was the GOP pick in Georgia for 2022. Available records seemed to indicate that the Walker campaign was using its recount fund, even after the candidate himself conceded the race, to stash at least some of the excess from donations that passed contribution limits. For the Trump campaign in 2020, money from their recount fund went to a firm that worked on handling documents… that for the most part weren’t even remotely related to issues involved in any recount. That company’s area of work instead included responses to requests from Congressional investigators for info on the response to COVID-19 by the Trump administration.
Later, they also helped handle dealing with the House panel that investigated the Capitol riot. Neither of these items were directly related to any recount, especially since efforts to contest the 2020 election were long over by the time the House panel investigating the riot started working. If one was to tie simply any former member of the Trump team to recount efforts by virtue of their past roles in his attempts to stay in office, where does it end? Besides, some of what the riot committee put under scrutiny extended before the election itself even happened or the results were reasonably finalized.
Funds left over after a campaign can be used to fund new operations like a leadership PAC, a kind of political organization that can then expand the given candidate’s efforts into the future. As explained by The Daily Beast, a watchdog organization filed a request under public records laws for materials from the FEC on the company that received so much of the Trump camp’s recount money. That organization received a response indicating records covered by the request could be the subject of an active investigation, which is about as much of an official confirmation as members of the public are going to get — and it’s not as though government agencies normally just use that response for everything.
“To the extent that the records you requested concern an ongoing FEC enforcement matter, we can neither confirm nor deny that any such records exist,” an attorney with the FEC said. The company that was the subject of the denied request for records, having received large portions of Trump’s recount money, is known as 2M Document Management and Imaging, LLC. The Daily Beast identified that more than $4.6 million in what that company has raked in from Trump originated with the recount money. The founder of the documents firm also identified himself as assisting the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) under questioning from the House riot committee.
