Posted on 03/12/2019 11:55:17 AM PDT by Liz
Former FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky called for an investigation into alleged campaign finance violations by NY Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her top aide.“There seems to be enough evidence here to justify opening a criminal investigation,” von Spakovsky wrote in a Fox News op-ed Sunday.
Ocasio-Cortez and her top aide Saikat Chakrabarti have since December 2017, controlled the outside PAC credited with being the central force behind her June 2018 primary victory. An ex-FEC Commissioner called for an investigation into alleged campaign finance violations by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her top aide Saikat Chakrabarti.
Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti have, since December 2017, held legal authority over Justice Democrats PAC, an outside PAC credited with orchestrating her upset primary victory over incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in June 2018.
The conservative National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) also filed an FEC complaint last week, first reported by the Washington Examiner, alleging that Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, another PAC controlled by Chakrabarti, funneled $1 million into two private companies under his control during the 2018 midterms.
“As a former FEC commissioner who has studied the complaint against Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti, I have concluded that there is unquestionably more than enough evidence to justify the FEC opening a civil investigation,” Hans von Spakovsky, now a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow, wrote in a Fox News op-ed Sunday.
Ocasio-Cortez never disclosed to the FEC that she and Chakrabarti, who served as her campaign chair, controlled Justice Democrats PAC while it was simultaneously supporting her primary campaign. If the FEC finds that her campaign and the political action committee were operating in affiliation, it could result in her campaign receiving excessive contributions, former FEC commissioner Brad Smith told TheDCNF.
“If someone gave Ocasio-Cortez a $2,700 contribution and then gave another contribution to either of the other two PACS that Ocasio-Cortez and/or Chakrabarti were running, her campaign violated federal law by receiving and keeping a contribution above the legal limit,” von Spakovsky explained.
Ocasio-Cortez called the NLPC’s complaint a “conspiracy theory” propagated by conservative groups looking to receive airtime on Fox News. However, she hasn’t addressed TheDCNF’s reporting surrounding her and Chakrabarti’s “legal control over” Justice Democrats starting in December 2017.
The two continue to serve as “governors” of Justice Democrats, according to the PAC’s business filings in Washington D.C. CNN, ABC News, NBC News and The Washington Post also didn’t disclose the facts surrounding Ocasio-Cortez’s control over Justice Democrats in stories about the freshman Democrat’s mounting campaign finance scandals.
Von Spakovsky said Chakrabarti’s use of two LLCs under his control to fund “campaign infrastructure and fundraising” services for his PACs and 12 political candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, runs counter to Ocasio-Cortez’s call for more transparency in government. “Is the NY congresswoman – who claims to be an honest and upstanding crusader for good government and transparency – really a hypocrite who improperly hid her own campaign spending in a complex maze of fundraising groups?” von Spakovsky asked.
Von Spakovsky said he expects the four active FEC commissioners, two Republicans, one Democrat and one independent, will vote in favor of opening an investigation into Ocasio-Cortez “given all the evidence of possible violations of the law that has already been made public.”
“We don’t know what further investigation will find,” he said. “But it is clear an investigation is needed to determine if Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti broke the law.”
Chakrabarti is the guy at risk for a felony indictment, IMO.
They probably wont confront her publicly............
but they can do a lot behind the scenes to undermine her.
Won’t happen, she’s a Democrat!
WOW!!!
That kind of goes in the face of her being picked at an audition to run and having powerful backers.
They’re gonna let her ruin all that over this??
Unless the backers didn’t know. In which case they may have wasted a lot of money.
Good.
Well if she had powerful backers, this actually makes some sense. How do you circumvent the campaign finance laws? One way is to shuffle the money around. Big backer gives the max to the campaign, but then gives more to the private corporation. The private corp can then be used to pay for a lot of the campaign expenses on the side - should be disclosed, but easy to pay consultants, venues, printers, catering etc via the private corp without disclosing it as a campaign expense. Just theorizing, not accusing.
I don’t know all the details. Someone above has the company and PAC names listed. It seems clear to me that there is great motivation to name a charity/PAC and a company with the exact same name in order to cheat like I described, to shuffle money around to make a very marginal candidate look like she has broad financial support.
But also as I wrote, I think she only won for the fact that her constituents were totally apathetic in the primary. I may have the number wrong, but something like only 13,000 votes were cast in the primary. So she didn’t need to motivate that many people to beat the incumbent. Once she won the primary she was a shoe-in since so many people just vote (D) in the election without much more thought than that.
Very interesting post.
Shadiest house member and backers in a while.
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