Ellen L. Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, said on Thursday that President Trump had moved to fire her.
Ms. Weintraub, who has served as a Democratic commissioner on the bipartisan panel since 2002, posted a short letter signed by Mr. Trump on social media that said she was “hereby removed” from the commission effective immediately. She said in an interview that she did not see the president’s move as legally valid, and that she was considering her options on how to respond.
“There’s a perfectly legal way for him to replace me,” Ms. Weintraub said on Thursday evening. “But just flat-out firing me, that is not it.”
The F.E.C., the nation’s top campaign watchdog agency, is made up of six commissioners, three aligned with Democrats and three with Republicans. That structure has contributed to repeated partisan deadlocks over elections investigations that scrutinize one party or another. Ms. Weintraub’s term as commissioner expired in 2007, but she has continued to serve on the board. The position of chair rotates every year. Ms. Weintraub took up the post again in January.
A commissioner is removed only after a replacement is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and Ms. Weintraub said that the president did not have the power to force her off the commission before that. Mr. Trump did not name a successor to Ms. Weintraub in his letter, and it would take weeks at least for his choice for commissioner to be approved by the Senate.
Trevor Potter, a former commissioner and chairman of the commission nominated by President George H.W. Bush, denounced the move to fire Ms. Weintraub in a statement, saying that doing so would violate constitutional separation of powers.
“Congress explicitly, and intentionally, created the FEC to be an independent, bipartisan federal agency whose commissioners are confirmed by Congress,” said Mr. Potter, who is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan campaign watchdog. He added: “As the only agency that regulates the president, Congress intentionally did not grant the president the power to fire F.E.C. commissioners.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Weintraub was the chief architect of a novel strategy to further paralyze the commission in partisan deadlocks in order to compel enforcement of the nation’s election laws through the courts. She previously described it as a last resort after years of enforcement efforts being stymied by the three Republicans on the commission.
Ms. Weintraub on Thursday also pointed to her public statements about F.E.C. complaints focused on Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns as one reason she may have earned the president’s ire.
“There have been dozens of complaints filed against the president,” Ms. Weintraub said, noting that the commission has not been able to pursue them because of the 3-to-3 partisan deadlock.
She added, “I have pointed that out. I’ve written about this. So I’m not really surprised that I am on their radar.”
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