Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaign head honcho Saikat Chakrabarti is in the soup: On Monday, a complaint was filed against him with the Federal Election Commission.
The submission alleges that Saikat funneled over $1 million in election donations to his private companies.
The Washington Examiner explained:
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.
This follows another recent complaint made with the FEC claiming AOC’s boyfriend, Riley Roberts, was paid thousands of dollars through a PAC scheme (read more here).
As pointed out by the Examiner, cash payments through PACs diametrically oppose Alexandria’s stance against political “dark money” in favor of transparency.
As for Saikat, a former Commission big wig asserted something’s awry:
Bradley A. Smith, a former chairman of the FEC, said he has never seen such an arrangement. “It’s a really weird situation,” he said. “I see almost no way that you can do that without it being at least a reporting violation, quite likely a violation of the contribution limits. You might say from a campaign finance angle that the LLC was essentially operating as an unregistered committee.”
Former FEC lawyer Adav Noti agrees:
“None of that makes any sense. I can’t even begin to disentangle that. They’re either confused or they’re trying to conceal something.”
Alexandria’s touted herself as being so above any semblance of politics as usual (or worse): At the end of February, she announced a “living wage” for all her employees, despite its effect of decapitating her higher-ranking team members.
Now it seems her attempt at squeaky-clean transparency may be headed for the guillotine of scrutiny.
Stay tuned for more — from RedState’s illustrious Jennifer Van Laar.
-Alex
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