Border agency funds a Trump ad Democrats call illegal, for a candidate who'd already dropped his name.

…(cont) ABC's sources traced the money to the Department of Homeland Security. Collins traced it one step further, to the appropriation written for Customs and Border Protection.

House Democratic appropriators call this a misuse of CBP funding, coming, in the Hill's own words, weeks out from the November midterms. Public Citizen calls it something with sharper edges: two complaints filed Tuesday, asking the FCC, the FTC, and the broadcasters themselves to pull the spots, on the theory that a taxpayer-funded ad promoting one sitting official is the exact conduct the disclaimer law was written to catch. The accusation and the complaint are not filed by the same people and do not allege the same violation — one names a misused appropriation, the other a specific statute — but they describe the same commercial.

Here is the reconciliation, hon: an appropriation written for Customs and Border Protection produced a media campaign built around one name, in the same six days that the one Republican running on that name took it off his own sign. The money did not vanish. It changed columns — from the border agency's ledger to a broadcast slot — and it is sitting, right now, in an ad Charlie Hatcher never asked for and isn't using.