(This post may contain disputed claims. We make no assertions as to the validity of the information presented by our Opinion Columnist. We are an opinion blog, not a traditional news outlet, and this post should be treated as such. Enjoy.)Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t thinking about her abomination called the Green New Deal today. No, the 29-year-old former bartender is burning up her cell phone calling her attornies after a former FEC commissioner said late Monday afternoon she “could see jail time.” The Congresswoman’s campaign moved $885,000 dollars into two slush funds, and you won’t believe how her live-in boyfriend is involved. Don’t miss this.
An FEC complaint filed Monday charges Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her Chief of Staff, and others, including AOC’s live-in boyfriend Riley Roberts, with using two PACs and LLCs to hide hundreds of thousands in campaign dollars.
A Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) filed Monday accused Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti of using two PACs (Political Action Committees) he founded to funnel around $1 million to two of his private companies, according to the Washington Examiner. The companies may have been used to hide what funds were spent on.
“These are not minor or technical violations. We are talking about real money here. In all my years of studying FEC reports, I’ve never seen a more ambitious operation to circumvent reporting requirements,” said Tom Anderson, director of NLPC’s Government Integrity Project. “Representative Ocasio-Cortez has been quite vocal in condemning so-called dark money, but her own campaign went to great lengths to avoid the sunlight of disclosure.”
“They believe their cause is so great that they don’t have to play by the rules. They believe that they are above campaign finance law,” added Anderson.
Funds traveling through Brand New Congress LLC were spent on ten or more candidates, according to NLPC, which stated the LLC was “apparently operated by Chakrabarti.” And the funny thing is if not for AOC’s live-in boyfriend, none of this would have come to light.
After conservative reporter Luke Thompson noticed Riley Roberts had been paid by AOC’s campaign yet he wasn’t employed as a staffer, he started digging deeper. That’s when he found AOC’s Chief of Staff had created two separate Political Action Committees (PAC’s) that then funneled $885,000 dollars to LLCs he set up. The LLCs act as slush funds which the FEC has no control over. It’s illegal.
“The cash transfers from the PACs — overseen by Saikat Chakrabarti, the freshman socialist Democrat’s chief of staff — run counter to her pledges to increase transparency and reduce the influence of ‘dark money’ in politics,” the Washington Examiner reports. “Chakrabarti’s companies appear to have been set up for the sole purpose of obscuring how the political donations 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.
“It appears ‘strategic consulting’ was a mischaracterization of a wide range of activities that should have been reported individually,” the complaint states.
Now, it’s looking rather bleak for the 29-year-old from New York. Amid the allegations, a former FEC commissioner late Monday suggested in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation that Ocasio-Cortez and her team could separately be facing major fines and potentially even jail time if they were knowingly and willfully violating the law by hiding their control of the Justice Democrats political action committee (PAC).
“The funds, the NLPC writes, were likely spent on campaign events for Ocasio-Cortez and other far-left Democratic candidates favored by Chakrabarti, who made his fortune in Silicon Valley and previously worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. But no precise accounting for the expenses is available, and the complaint asks the FEC to conduct an investigation into the matter immediately,” Fox News reports.
Former FEC Associate General Counsel for Policy Adav Noti, who currently directs the Campaign Legal Center, told Fox News that it was a “total mystery” to him why Chakrabarti had established an LLC seemingly to take money from the PAC, rather than simply create a “normal venture,” like a consulting business, to provide services for candidates on the books.
“Certainly, it’s not permissible to use an LLC or any other kind of intermediary to conceal the recipient or purpose of a PAC’s spending,” Noti said. “The law requires the PAC to report who it disburses money to. You can’t try to evade that by routing it through an LLC or corporation or anyone else.”
This is what happens when you don’t think the rules apply to you. The leftist motto “the end justifies the means” teaches this new wave of political punks like AOC, Rep. Ihan Omar, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib that they are above the law.
Brainwashed by their own importance they blindly lash out at our American values believing they are the new messiahs who will transform America into a Socialistic third world country. Well, that’s not going to happen. Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez was a flash in the pan, and time’s up on her 15 minutes of fame. She won’t be remembered by anyone.
