New allegations that a pro-Hillary Clinton outside spending group and two that are backing Donald Trump have illegally coordinated with the candidates' campaigns are refocusing attention on a concept that regulators have never quite nailed down.

This is some fuzzy math.

Yesterday morning, we published a story saying that Jeffrey Miller, campaign manager of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry's 2016 presidential campaign and the director of his leadership PAC, received nearly half the money spent by those organizations. Yesterday afternoon, we pulled the story.

This week, the Federal Election Commission did the unthinkable. The agency most frequently characterized by its constant, crippling deadlock levied a substantial fine against three large politically active nonprofit groups.

Cary Peterson spent all of May behind bars in New Jersey, arrested for securities fraud and sending handwritten complaints to the district court about the difficulty of using prison phones. He spent June getting out on bail and creating a new super PAC.