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John,

Nearly one year ago, CREW sued the Federal Election Commission over its decade-long failure to enforce the law against the American Action Network, one of the largest dark money groups in existence.

The FEC and AAN both wanted to see the case dismissed, but just last week, a court rejected their efforts – reaffirming Americans’ right to go to court to combat dark money.

We’ve been demanding that the FEC pursue allegations that AAN’s big money spending on express advocacy campaign ads and electioneering communications (also known as sham issue ads) requires AAN to publicly disclose its donors.

We’ve literally sued three times over this. Here’s why:

If AAN had to publicly disclose its donors, that would open up over a hundred million dollars in dark money spending to public scrutiny.

The first two times we sued, the FEC deadlocked three-to-three, with the Republican commissioners refusing to allow an investigation of our allegations.

After a judge said the FEC’s refusal to enforce the law against AAN “blinked reality” and questioned the sincerity of the FEC commissioners who denied AAN’s political purposes, we were allowed to sue AAN directly. With the court recently rejecting an effort to get rid of one of our three cases, we’re standing up for transparency for political spending and getting one step closer to exposing dark money.

Groups that spend millions or billions to influence federal elections through campaign activities need to disclose their donors — and the sources of the hundreds of millions of dollars behind them must be opened up to public scrutiny. That’s what this is all about.

Thank you,

Team CREW