With a quiet, almost unnoticed nomination just before Thanksgiving, President Barack Obama rewarded Media Matters for its help in attacking reporters and critics of the administration. At the same time, he virtually guaranteed that a federal agency that is supposed to improve the administration of elections will instead become a partisan battleground intended to help his political party.
On Nov. 19, the White House issued a press release announcing that it was withdrawing the nomination of Myrna Perez, a lawyer at the Brennan Center, to be a commissioner on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). It instead nominated Matthew S. Butler, the former CEO and president of the George Soros-funded left-wing advocacy group Media Matters, to replace her....
The common characteristic of its new commissioners — and past commissioners like Paul DeGregorio or Donetta Davidson — has been that most of them were experienced election administrators at the state and local level, or at least election lawyers familiar with the federal and state election laws that apply to the administration of elections. That is a necessity given the EAC’s responsibility for helping improve the election process....
He [Butler] has been a leader and organizer of the progressive movement, and the head of Media Matters when it was acting as an unofficial PR wing of the White House and the Justice Department. As first reported in 2012 by
Matthew Boyle, the administration was working with Media Matters “in an attempt to quell news stories about scandals plaguing [Eric] Holder and America’s top law enforcement agency,” including using Media Matters “to attack reporters” at Townhall, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Fox News, and National Review....
The other three new commissioners on the EAC, in stark contrast to the former Media Matters CEO and president, actually have relevant election experience.
They include: Matthew Masterson, who worked for the Ohio secretary of State for three years and at the EAC for five years before that; Christy McCormick, a senior trial attorney in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice who also helped advise the Iraqi government on its new election system in 2009 and 2010; and Tom Hicks, the senior elections counsel for the Democratic minority at the House Administration Committee, the committee with jurisdiction over federal election laws.