That payment, which 'was far in excess of the legal limit for individual contributions for president,' was never reported on Trump's campaign filings, the Times writes.Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 for violating campaign finance laws. Subscribe for freeFlashback: Trump allegedly directed Cohen to pay adult-film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 on the eve of the 2020 election to keep quiet about her relationship with the former president. The Federal Election Commission announced Thursday that it won't proceed with a case examining whether former President Trump violated election law with 2016 a hush-money payment made through his then-lawyer Michael Cohen.The state of play: The election commission, split between three Republicans and three Democratic-aligned commissioners, dropped the proceeding in a closed-door meeting in February, per the New York Times.Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axios Markets. 'Everyone in the system knows that the FEC will not enforce the law because the Republican commissioners do not want to enforce the law.' More stories from The doom-loop of a falling fertility rateThe real reason Liz Cheney lost her jobDemocrats are fiddling while Republicans prepare to burn down Rome

'There was nothing surprising about the notification,' said Democracy 21's Fred Wertheimer. The FEC declined to comment on the Trump Tower case, but Democracy 21, one of the groups that filed the complaint, told Axios it had been notified of the case's closure. The deadlocked FEC also recently rejected an investigation into Trump's hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels right before the 2016 election. All but one of the outstanding complaints have to do with former President Donald Trump's campaign. The FEC is working through a backlog of 2016 complaints, though little enforcement action is expected from any of the cases. The Trump campaign's motive for taking the meeting was to get proffered dirt on 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The tie means the FEC will drop the matter. The vote split along party lines, with the three Democratic commissioners voting to approve an investigation of campaign finance violations and the three Republican commissioners voting against it, reportedly on the technical grounds that the five-year statute of limitations expires in a few months. The Federal Election Commission deadlocked 3-3 against opening an investigation into whether Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort illegally solicited foreign assistance during a Trump Tower meeting with Russian envoys in June 2016, Axios reports.

Deadlocked FEC reportedly declines to investigate Donald Trump Jr.'s Trump Tower meeting with Russians

Watch dog of the old lords