Complaint alleging massive campaign finance violations prompts a denial from Ocasio-Cortez

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has some explaining to do, and I don’t think a simple denial will cut it.

The freshman congresswoman’s top aide, Saikat Chakrabarti, reportedly funneled more than $1 million through political action committees he founded into two private companies he owns, according to a new investigative report by the Washington Examiner’s Alana Goodman.



“Chakrabarti’s companies appear to have been set up for the sole purpose of obscuring how the political donations were used,” Goodman reports, citing a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by the watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center. The “arrangement skirted reporting requirements and may have violated the $5,000 limit on contributions from federal PACs to candidates.”

“PACs are required to disclose how and when funds are spent, including for expenditures such as advertisements, fundraising emails, donations to candidates, and payments for events and to vendors,” Goodman wrote. “The private companies to which Chakrabarti transferred the money from the PACs are not subject to these requirements.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded to the report Tuesday by asserting simply that “ there is no violation.” For a lawmaker whose path to Congress was paved with a promise to elevate the ethics of Washington, D.C., she’s going to have to do better than that in explaining how it’s kosher for her campaign-manager-turned-chief-of-staff to shuffle money through his PACs into his own private companies, whence it allegedly benefited other campaigns.

The Campaign Legal Center’s director, Adav Noti, himself a former FEC lawyer, told the Examiner that Chakrabarti’s arrangement is definitely unusual. He suggested that might have been done with an eye toward obscuring how the money changes hands.

“None of that makes any sense,” said Noti. “I can’t even begin to disentangle that. They’re either confused, or they’re trying to conceal something.”

“It does seem like there’s something amiss. I can only think of really two likely possibilities for this sort of pattern of disbursements,” he added. “One is the scam PAC possibility — they’re really just paying themselves, and they’re concealing it by using the LLC. The other is that there’s actually another recipient, that the money is going to the LLC and then being disbursed in some other way that they want to conceal.”

The thing that gets me is that Ocasio-Cortez has been in office for not even three months. Yet, her office already looks like a black hole of ethically dubious behavior.

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Well, you can’t have socialism without corruption. Bernie and his wife defrauded a college and now Occasional-Kotex has defrauded her campaign contributors.

Socialism for us. Graft for them.

She also will top off the pay for her aides at 80K per year, why? Because then they dont have to report additional income sources. Someone has been studying how to get around the rules to hide corruption or influence., or has been coaching her how to do this. I say the latter.
This slush fund thing calls for 2 years in the pokey.

@kitt: The only use liberals have for the Constitution is it tells them what they need to dodge. Pelosi is so interested in “ethics”, you think she’ll be driving an investigation to get to the bottom of this?

Naaaahhhh…..

@Deplorable Me: Pelosi is terrified of Barbie and her twitter account followers(lonely single guys that have a crush and socialist morons) The twitter bot attack would be awesome to see.