There Are Now F.E.C. Complaints Against Biden and Trump

A conservative group has filed a complaint against President Biden accusing him of violating federal election law by not officially informing the Federal Election Commission that he plans to run again in 2024.

The complaint is unlikely to succeed or be resolved quickly — not only because the commission has been hobbled for years by partisan infighting, but also because of the high burden of proof required to show that Mr. Biden has in fact decided to pursue re-election.

It nonetheless highlights the political bind the White House has found itself in while facing grumbling about the president from his fellow Democrats, as well as the gridlock that has crippled the nation’s top election agency and has led it to be mocked on late-night talk shows.

The complaint was filed more than five months after a Democratic super PAC filed a similar complaint against former President Donald J. Trump, who has openly flirted with another White House bid.

Americans for Public Trust filed the complaint against Mr. Biden on Tuesday. The group is led by Caitlin Sutherland, a former research director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans.

“It is very clear that President Biden meets the requirements of a candidate who needs to file with the F.E.C.,” Ms. Sutherland said in an interview.

Her group is asking the commission to investigate whether Mr. Biden is running what she described as a “shadow campaign,” using taxpayer money to conduct what in essence are political activities under the guise of official travel to swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. A potential punishment could include a hefty fine, as the F.E.C. has levied in the past.

The complaint claims that Mr. Biden’s official campaign committee, Biden for President, has spent more than $5 million since Jan. 20, 2021. Most of that money has gone toward expenses related to the 2020 presidential election, but the complaint notes that Biden for President has reported spending $1 million on outreach to voters over email and text messages.

Those messages, which are reviewed by Mr. Biden’s campaign lawyers for compliance with the law, promote his policy accomplishments, such as the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, and direct recipients to donate money to the Democratic National Committee.

But they also serve a tried-and-true function in political campaigns: keeping a valuable contact list warm in case Mr. Biden needs it for a future run.

The complaint also details a litany of public statements made by White House officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, indicating that Mr. Biden plans to seek re-election.

In late June, for instance, Ms. Harris told Dana Bash of CNN, “Joe Biden is running for re-election and I will be his ticketmate. Full stop.”

She quickly walked back those comments, however, as aides apparently realized the legal implications of prematurely declaring Mr. Biden’s candidacy before he has officially decided to run again.

Similarly, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on June 13 that Mr. Biden was “running for re-election.” She later tweeted that the president “intends to run in 2024,” only to clarify later that Mr. Biden had not yet decided.

Those comments came in response to public reports, including in The New York Times, suggesting that many Democrats were not eager to see Mr. Biden become their party’s nominee again in 2024 given his advanced age and his relative unpopularity.

White House officials and other surrogates for Mr. Biden leaned in hard against the emerging narrative, and, according to some accounts noted in the complaint, told reporters anonymously that they recognized that those comments had risked running afoul of legal restrictions on fund-raising.

“Biden cannot hide behind the word ‘intend’, and it’s not the shield he thinks it is,” Ms. Sutherland said.

The White House declined to comment, as did the Democratic National Committee.

Mr. Biden himself has been coy about whether he has indeed decided to seek the Oval Office again, often couching his answers with a caveat: that he intends to do so if he remains in good health, but will not make that determination until sometime after the November midterms.

In February, when a reporter asked if he was satisfied with Ms. Harris’s working on voting rights and whether she would be his running mate in 2024 “provided that you run again,” Mr. Biden replied, “yes and yes.”

The complaint omits the reporter’s conditional phrase.

Some campaign lawyers affiliated with the Democratic Party, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly, argued that the White House press secretary and even the vice president could not speak for Biden for President, the campaign committee — and therefore the commission was likely to dismiss the complaint quickly.

That would be unusual: The F.E.C. is notoriously lax about meeting its own statutory deadline of 120 days. A different election-law-related complaint filed by the same group, Americans for Public Trust, about the pre-candidacy activities of Jeb Bush, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, has been languishing for years.

Ann Ravel, a Democratic former commissioner at the F.E.C., said she found the complaint about Mr. Biden’s putative candidacy “persuasive.”

Ms. Ravel, who has long been an outspoken critic of the commission, which consists of three members appointed by each of the two major political parties, added that “of all the government agencies, the F.E.C. is probably the most dysfunctional of all.”

By law, a candidate is required to notify the commission within 15 days of deciding to run for federal office.

Despite the F.E.C.’s dysfunction, the convention among presidents has been to obey the letter of the law while countermanding its spirit.

Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden’s predecessor, exploded that convention through moves like holding his nominating convention on the White House grounds and failing to police violations of the Hatch Act, a law that governs political activities by presidential aides.

In March, American Bridge, a group aligned with Democrats, lodged an F.E.C. complaint against Mr. Trump, accusing him of violating campaign finance law by spending political funds on a 2024 presidential bid without formally declaring himself a candidate. The group later sued the F.E.C. over the matter, claiming that the agency’s inaction gave Mr. Trump a competitive advantage.

In a July interview with New York magazine, Mr. Trump said that “in my own mind, I’ve already made that decision, so nothing factors in anymore.”