A figure involved in funneling $1.7 million to a super PAC has taken the unusual step of suing the Federal Election Commission in an attempt to keep his or her name from becoming public.

The donor has remained a mystery as the FEC this year investigated how the $1.7 million was routed through political organizations to a Missouri-based group called Now or Never PAC, which spent close to $8 million dollars promoting Republican candidates in 2012, including failed Missouri Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin. The FEC tried to discover the donor’s identity as it sought to determine whether federal law was violated by passing the money through other political groups in order to conceal the original source of the funds.


As a super PAC, Now or Never PAC is allowed to accept and spend unlimited sums of money, but is supposed to publicly disclose the source of its funds on a regular basis. The FEC has investigated the donation and attempted to subpoena witnesses who could discuss the donation, according to a statement released by Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub on Tuesday.

But the commission “never learned the most important fact: the ultimate source of the almost two million dollars given to the PAC — the identify of the person who wrote the first check,” Weintraub wrote in a statement released on Tuesday. Weintraub alleged in the letter that witnesses subpoenaed by the FEC refused to cooperate in an effort to run down the statute of limitations on the case and keep the FEC from finding out the identity of the donor.

Court records unsealed Tuesday show that last Friday an anonymous individual referred to as “John Doe 1” and an unnamed related trust referred to as “John Doe 2” sued the FEC in federal court in Washington in an effort to block disclosure of information that the lawsuit said could amount to an invasion of privacy and infringe on First Amendment-protected political activity.

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“The disclosure that John Doe 2 and I were even marginally involved in an investigation into alleged violations of campaign finance law will damage my professional reputation,” the individual plaintiff said in a declaration filed in the case. “I fear that being connected to this investigation will damage my reputation and John Doe 2’s reputation.”


It is not entirely clear from the lawsuit whether the individual plaintiff is the donor behind the gift the FEC investigated or someone else deeply involved in the transaction.

In the face of the lawsuit and a request for a temporary restraining order, the FEC agreed to delete the names of the individual and the trust, as well as other identifying details, from records about the investigation made public on Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in an order Monday that the election panel’s agreement to withhold that information for now mooted the request for an immediate restraining order. She has not yet ruled on the legal claims in the case. William Taylor, an attorney for John Doe 1, and Michael Dry, a lawyer for the trust, declined to comment on the dispute Tuesday.

The original complaint about the donation, filed by the good government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, alleged Now or Never PAC had accepted $1.7 million in anonymous funds that were illegally funneled through the American Conservative Union, an organization best known for putting together the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Super PACs, which have to disclose the sources of their spending, are not allowed to accept money that is funneled through so-called “straw donors” who don’t reveal their funds.


The FEC reached an agreement earlier this fall with the American Conservative Union over the complaint, and ACU agreed to pay a $350,000 fine. According to the agreement reached by the ACU with the FEC, an ACU executive indicated in an email at the time that the group kept $90,000 of the money that was initially transferred to it.

"This is one of the clearest cases we've seen of laundering money through a dark money nonprofit to conceal the source of a political contribution," CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said at the time.