Today, the Election Law Enforcement Commission ruled that Governor Chris Christie’s reelection campaign could use leftover campaign funds and raise additional money to pay for the costs of complying with subpoenas. ELEC Executive Director Jeff Brindle told NJTV News Managing Editor Mike Schneider that the commission made the right decision because members want to do everything possible to help expedite the investigation.
Brindle said when the commission meets, recommendations are made but not always followed. In this case, he said he agreed with the ruling.
“I think very definitely the commission made the right decision. Particularly because we are a disclosure agency and we wanted to do everything — the commission wanted to do everything — we possibly could to help to expedite the investigation because we thought it was in the public interest to do so,” Brindle said.
It is in the public’s interest to move the investigation ahead, rather than impede it any way by not allowing Christie to be able to use campaign funds to be able to respond to the subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney and the Legislative Investigation Committee, Brindle said.
“The regulations in the law allows for money to be used in some way in a connection to a campaign for administrative costs and the commission took the position that this would come under a campaign expense and an administrative cost of doing business as a campaign,” Brindle said.
In the past, the U.S. Attorney and the commission restricted the use of campaign funds in the case of defending against a criminal investigation, Brindle said. He said that the commission determined today that the case is not considered a criminal investigation, so it is distinct from other cases. The distinction is made because the subpoenas were directed toward the committee, not toward an individual office holder, Brindle said.
“There is precedence going back to 1993 when there was an issue with the Whitman campaign for governor where there were allegations against the campaign for suppressing the vote, the African-American vote. Those allegations were unfounded. There were three investigations, one of them was by the ELEC but in that case, the Whitman campaign asked the commission if they could use campaign funds to defend against those actions and the commission said that they could. There is precedence for this determination,” Brindle said.