Legal Issues
Following the campaign of John Kerry, the Federal Election Commission unanimously voted to levy a $580,000 fine against the Fund. The penalty was the seventh largest in FEC history. The FEC determined that more than 90 percent of the $60 million raised by the Media Fund came from labor unions, corporations or from donors who gave more $5,000 — all contributions barred by federal election rules. Lyn Utrecht represented the Media Fund in the settlement. Erik Smith, president of the Media Fund, would later issue a statement pointing out that the FEC settlement did not find his group in violation of the law.The FEC had already fined a number of the other major 527s for illegal spending during the 2004 elections, including the Democratic-leaning groups MoveOn.org and the George Soros-backed America Coming Together, as well as the Republican-supporting groups Progress for America Voter Fund and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Read more about this topic: Media Fund
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or issues:
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can’t stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn’t legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)