By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Miami billionaire and philanthropist Stuart Miller, longtime boss of Lennar Corp., one of the nation’s largest home builders, just got lucky big time.
On Friday, the Federal Election Commission released its determination that while Miller used the shell company Tread Standard LLC to secretly make $125,000 in illegal contributions to two Republican Super PACS in 2022, the cases against him were dismissed without penalty.
Instead, the FEC decided that the Super PACS and Tread Standard likely violated federal reporting requirements by failing to identify Miller as the true donor. They signed settlement agreements, promised not to do it again, and no penalties were imposed on them.
Federal law requires that political contributions be properly attributed to protect the integrity of the federal campaign process. The Federal Election Campaign Act says, “No person shall make a contribution in the name of another person or knowingly permit his name to be used to effect such a contribution, and no person shall knowingly accept a contribution made by one person in the name of another person.”
An FEC statement issued in the case last September says the commission received “a range of complaints” alleging that political committees had erroneously disclosed LLCs as the contributors instead of their beneficial owners – that is, actual human beings.
“The complainants alleged that these were contributions in the name of another – that is, straw donations. We disagreed…We believe these matters are better understood as failures to correctly attribute these contributions,” says the statement by the four commissioners, two Republicans and two Democrats.
The FEC has now implemented its new enforcement paradigm by letting Stuart Miller, the true donor and sole member of Tread Standard, off completely. It did so despite Miller’s admission – after being caught – to using Tread Standard “to prevent disclosure of Miller’s identity,” says an FEC investigative report completed in December 2023.
‘A ROAD MAP TO VIOLATE THE LAW’
Commissioners also made it clear that this is how such cases will be treated going forward – as potentially less serious reporting violations. Under that scheme, the only way a political committee can get in trouble with the FEC is when a contribution comes in from an LLC and they fail to use what the FEC deems their “best efforts” to determine who the true donor was.
But best effort doesn’t mean much. The Super PAC’s treasurer can ask the LLC to disclose, but if he receives no answer, that’s considered a best effort.
“It’s a road map to violate the law and get away with it,” said an attorney and federal campaign finance law expert who declined to be named.
Voters, you don’t really need to know who makes $100,000 contributions to your candidates now, do you?
The two conduit contributions in the Tread Standard case were for $100,000 and $25,000. If the FEC had pursued the cases as contributions made in the name of another, instead of shifting the blame to the entities that received the money, Miller could have faced possible criminal prosecution. Federal campaign finance law makes it a five-year felony to contribute $25,000 or more in the name of another.
USING AN LLC TO STAY ANONYMOUS
In 2022, Miller wanted to give $100,000 to help former football player Herschel Walker win a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia but was afraid that if his big donation became public, lots of candidates would start hitting him up, the FEC records show.
But thanks to his lawyer, Miami real estate expert Brian Bilzin, he had a ready-made solution.
Seven years before, upon Bilzin’s advice, Miller had created the limited liability Delaware corporation Tread Standard, for the express purpose of making anonymous political contributions.
Miller used it in 2015 to contribute $150,000 to Jeb Bush’s Super PAC, Right to Rise. The American Democracy Legal Fund filed a complaint with the FEC back then, alleging it violated the prohibition on contributions in the name of another.
In response, attorney Bilzin told the FEC that Tread Standard had acted on his advice. He cited Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 decision that said corporations have a constitutionally protected right to make unlimited contributions to independent expenditure organizations and as a result there was no violation of any law or rule.
Miller got off when in 2018 the commission, as it often does, deadlocked. So he believed he could continue to do so, according to FEC documents released Friday.
So, on March 30, 2022, Tread Standard made that fat, $100,000 contribution to Walker’s Super PAC, 34N22. (Number 34 was on Walker’s University of Georgia uniform when he won the Heisman Trophy in 1982.)
Tread Standard also contributed $25,000 to the Super PAC of U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Miami, South Florida Residents First, on Nov. 3, 2020.
Walker lost and Gimenez won. And the name Stuart Miller was nowhere to be found on the required federal filings disclosing the source of those contributions.
BILZIN’S BAD ADVICE
Two years later, the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center complained to the Federal Election Commission that Tread Standard was a straw donor used to illegally conceal the name of the true donor. It based that assertion “on the lack of any apparent activity by Tread Standard other than the making of state and federal contributions, the FEC records say.
Florida election records show Tread Standard was used by Miller to anonymously contribute a total of $380,000 between November 2020 and April 2022. Friends of Ron DeSantis, later known as Empower Parents PAC before it disbanded in 2023, raked in $210,000. Friends of Wilton Simpson, Florida’s agriculture commissioner, was given $20,000. Miami for Everyone, a political committee of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, got $100,000. The Republican Party of Florida collected $50,000.
The Washington, D.C. firm Covington & Burling responded to the Campaign Legal Center’s complaint on behalf of Tread Standard and Stuart Miller in November 2022. The firm argued that neither of them “intended impermissibly to avoid the Commission’s disclosure regime, they at all times relied on the advice of counsel.” The firm added, “This matter is best analyzed as consisting of reporting attribution errors rather than contributions in the name of another, and those errors have been corrected by Mr. Miller and Tread Standard.”
The law firm went on to note that Stuart Miller “understood from counsel [Bilzin] that federal law permitted them to be made through Tread Standard without any disclosure requirement for him personally” based on the FEC’s deadlocked vote in 2018.
But in the months that followed “several commissioners” had issued “Statements of Reasons” in other cases that “struck a cautionary note” about the practice and Miller was unaware of them, the law firm wrote.
Then comes the oops. “Brian Bilzin did not read the Statements of Reason and did not inform Mr. Miller of them. Mr. Bilzin does not recall receiving them, or being made aware of them until recently,” the letter says.
Bilzin, who admitted that in a sworn declaration attached to Covington & Burling’s letter to the FEC, is the founder of Miami’s well-known 100-attorney firm Bilzin Sumberg.
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