From Roll Call (sub. req.):
The Federal Election Commission will decide next Thursday whether presumptive presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) broke campaign finance laws late last year by taking out a bank loan to keep his then-struggling campaign afloat.
In the recently rebooted agency’s first major test, the FEC distributed a draft opinion Thursday siding with McCain, whose fate the commission’s three Democrats and three Republicans must still decide at the public meeting next week.
The agency’s legal department concluded that McCain did not break the law by taking the loan — and then exceeding contribution limits — despite warnings to the contrary from since-ousted FEC chairman David Mason, who had a tense back-and-forth with the campaign in early 2008.
“We believe that the matching payment act does permit candidates to withdraw after they have been declared eligible,” the FEC’s lawyers concluded in their new draft guidance. “Although no eligible candidate may exceed the expenditure limits, the statues simply do not say whether the commission has discretion to reverse its eligibility determination and decertify a candidate.”
