also with me, ellen weintraub, a commissioner for the federal election commission.da where we mark ballots by hand, get counted by hand and government people count them. some of them are appointed by whatever the electoral body, maybe they're volunteers or are paid, and there are people who monitor those elections. this business of a random company coming in, a company led by somebody who has a dog in this fight seems very strange and unseemly to me. >> yes, it is quite unusual. i have observed elections around the world, and i've never seen anything quite like this. election officials from across the country, both democrats and republicans have expressed a great deal of concern about this. there's nothing wrong with auditing the election after an election. in fact, it should be done by experienced, accredited, non-partisan professionals. unfortunately, this company doesn't seem to meet any of those criteria. it's deeply troubling that they have their hands on the ballot and neutral observers like that reporter are being thrown out of the room. there is a deeply tro

an fec commissioner ellen weintraub joins me now.nd doesn't work. first of all, the first question, i guess, is the timeline. this happened in 2016. it became known in 2018. why did it take so long to even get to this point? >> -- absolutely should and often we will wait for other agencies to complete what they're doing because that is one way we learn information. in this case what our lawyers had available to them was a wealth of information from congressional hearings and from the testimony and the plea deal that michael cohen entered into. so we had -- they didn't actually do a formal investigation, which would have required a vote of the commission to start, and that was the vote that the republican commissioners blocked. they said we couldn't do an investigation. we couldn't pursue this case in any way. it was just time to go home because michael cohen had already been prosecuted, so there was nothing else to do according to them. >> i mean the bigger issue here, right, is that the fec is a bipartisan commission with a sort of