Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub said Friday that she was refusing to accept her dismissal from the agency, despite having her equipment confiscated and saying she “believed” she was no longer allowed entry to the agency’s headquarters.
“I’m still considering all of my options at the moment,” Weintraub said in a Friday evening interview with Rachel Maddow. “But I will tell you that my email has been turned off. My computers have been taken. My pass, I believe, no longer gets me into the building.”
Weintraub disclosed in a Feb. 6 post on X that she had received a letter from President Donald Trump stating that she was “hereby removed as a member” of the FEC. She added that there was “a legal way to replace FEC commissioners-this isn’t it.”
Received a letter from POTUS today purporting to remove me as Commissioner & Chair of @FEC. There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners-this isn’t it. I’ve been lucky to serve the American people & stir up some good trouble along the way. That’s not changing anytime soon. pic.twitter.com/7voecN2vpj
— Ellen L. Weintraub (@ellenlweintraub.bsky.social) (@EllenLWeintraub) February 6, 2025
Under federal law, the commission is evenly divided between three Republicans and three Democrats. However, just two Republicans sit on the commission after the third — Sean Cooksey — submitted his resignation on Jan. 20, the same day Trump was inaugurated to his second term.
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Cooksey wrote in a resignation letter that he hoped “the next president will exercise his constitutional authority to remove commissioners whose terms of service have expired and nominate new appointees who will respect the First Amendment.”
Weintraub was originally appointed to the commission in 2002 for a six-year term, but federal law allows commissioners to remain after their terms have expired unless the president appoints a replacement. Of the remaining members, Weintraub is the only one whose term has expired.
She also holds the FEC’s chair position this year — which rotates between the two parties annually — for the fourth time in her 22-year career at the agency. She held the title previously in 2003, 2013, and 2019. She used her position in those years to make headlines on a variety of issues, including aggressive efforts to impose more rules on online political activity, which critics viewed as an effort to create new disclosure rules for websites such as the Drudge Report. She was one of two FEC members in 2016 — along with then-Commissioner Ann Ravel — to complain that attention from Drudge caused them to receive a deluge of “strongly-worded emails,” which The Daily Beast characterized as “death threats.”
In years following the 2016 election, she tied her efforts to alleged Russian influence in U.S. elections. She made news in 2019 for publishing an agency memo on Twitter — now known as X — about the influence of foreign interests on U.S. elections, despite a decision by her colleagues to block the memo’s formal publication. The New York Times noted at the time that “the act of defiance” came “amid a deepening impeachment inquiry by Democrats on Capitol Hill and the release of a whistleblower’s complaint that said President Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to look into unsubstantiated allegations of corruption against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his younger son,” Hunter Biden.
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In her Friday interview with Maddow, Weintraub lamented that she should “still be sitting” in her post as the rotating chair.
“The Republicans always get the election year, and that means the year after the election year, there’s usually a Democrat who is in the chair,” she said. “And it just happened to be my turn, and I was duly elected by my colleagues. And that’s why I should be still sitting in the chair.”
She said she did not believe the president had the authority to fire commissioners unless he first appointed a replacement. “You can replace them when their terms have expired by appointing a new commissioner who gets confirmed by the Senate,” Weintraub said.
She added, “We’re celebrating our 50th anniversary this year, and this has never happened before.”
You can watch Weintraub’s full interview with Maddow above.