PAC likely served as pass-through to mitigate campaign’s mounting debt, reporter claims
FEBRUARY 20, 2019
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) used a political action committee (PAC) to funnel campaign funds back to her boyfriend, according to reports.
Republican strategist Luke Thompson first made known on Twitter last week that Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend Riley Roberts had a house.gov email address and was designated as one of her “Staff,” therefore “drawing a salary on the taxpayer’s dime.”
The revelation was met with fierce opposition by Ocasio-Cortez and her Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti, who accused Thompson of “doxxing” Roberts despite the information being publicly available, and failed to explain why Roberts would need such access.
“Per the House Admin office, a family member can, in special circumstances, get a house.gov email address,” Thompson reported Wednesday.
“But Roberts is not a family member, and although AOC referred to him as her partner in November of last year, she omitted him from her mandatory candidate financial disclosures for 2017 and 2018. Perhaps they’ve gotten married since. If so — if he is her spouse now — we should see his finances disclosed along with hers in her 2019 disclosure form due in May. But to be clear, AOC did not disclose Roberts’s finances as a spouse during her campaign.”
As Chakrabarti noted, Roberts also isn’t an unpaid volunteer and “isn’t doing any government work.”
Additionally, instead of producing the appropriate evidence to refute Thompson’s claims, the mainstream media attempted to provide cover for Ocasio-Cortez using their own talking points.
“Instead of asking if Roberts had been supplied with the badge and pin appropriate to a Congressional spouse, evidence of which her office should have been able to produce easily, AOC’s worshipful stenographers in the press went into overdrive witlessly repeating her talking-points,” Thompson wrote.
Former chairman of the House Oversight Committee Jason Chaffetz said Friday that such an arrangement was “inappropriate.”
“It’s totally naïve and inappropriate – you wouldn’t allow it in most companies, let alone the House of Representatives. There should be real consequences,” he told Fox News.
“When I was in the House, my scheduler would forward my wife my schedule once a week. But you’re not allowed unfettered access. And he isn’t even her spouse…It should be referred to the ethics committee for further investigation,” he added.
It gets deeper: Chakrabarti co-founded a PAC called Brand New Congress LLC in 2017, which Ocasio-Cortez paid for “strategic consulting” for her campaign.
Brand New Congress LLC then hired Roberts as a “marketing consultant” for AOC’s campaign, paying him approximately $6,000.
“Why would Chakrabarti, a founding engineer at Stripe and a wealthy veteran of Silicon Valley, be hiring a no-name ‘UX Experience’ guy with little discernible marketing experience to serve as Brand New Congress PAC’s sole marketing consultant?” Thompson asked.
“The answer seems to be that Chakrabarti was funneling money paid to him by AOC’s campaign back to Roberts and by extension to AOC,” Thompson wrote.
In effect, Chakrabarti likely reimbursed AOC through Brand New Congress LLC to mitigate her campaign’s mounting debt, he says.
“Regardless of whether or not Roberts was officially AOC’s spouse at that time, it seems probable Chakrabarti was reimbursing her for her campaign expenses off-books. Brand New Congress PAC simply served as a pass-through to do so,” Thompson continued.
After Ocasio-Cortez won in the 2018 midterms, she then hired Chakrabarti as her Chief of Staff.
“That’s definitely unethical and potentially illegal,” Thompson wrote. “Chakrabarti may have made an illegal campaign contribution in excess of federal limits. Regardless, it raises questions about Chakrabarti’s hiring as AOC’s Chief of Staff after her election.”
A shocking aspect of this is that the mainstream media failed to uncover (or simply ignored) any of this information despite the fact it was publicly available for scrutiny.
For now, it appears AOC is adjusting to the swamp just fine.
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