Democrat Party Poster-Girl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is up to her eyeballs in earned media. She’s also up to her eyeballs in gaffes and, yes – trouble. And not just that business about funneling campaign funds to her boyfriend. Her “chief of staff” is alleged to have used two PACS to disguise how up to a million dollars in campaign contributions were used.
The arrangement skirted reporting requirements and may have violated the $5,000 limit on contributions from federal PACs to candidates, according to the complaint filed by the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group.
Campaign finance attorneys described the arrangement as “really weird” and an indication “there’s something amiss.” They said there was no way of telling where the political donations went — meaning they could have been pocketed or used by the company to pay for off-the-books campaign operations.
Ocasio-Cortez and Saikat Chakrabarti are named in the complaint. Which, given that Ocasio-Cortez has been blabbing about transparency and reducing dark money in politics, makes this all very interesting.
Tom Anderson, director of the National Legal and Policy Center’s Government Integrity Project, said: “It appears Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her associates ran an off-the-books operation to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, thus violating the foundation of all campaign finance laws: transparency.”
Based on the way the money is being moved from a PAC to an LLC, the speculation is that they are either paying themselves or some unknown third party – large sums of money.
At the very least this we’re looking at skirting reporting requirements or campaign limits violations — all the more interesting given her transparency and dark money rhetoric.
