Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff Accused of Hiding Campaign Funds

Last updated on: March 4, 2019 at 7:03 pm by Susan Wright

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff Accused of Hiding Campaign Funds 2019-03-04T19:03:08-05:00 Susan Wright

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Somehow, I knew we would end up here. I just didn’t expect it to be so soon!

I mean, serious question here for the defenders of freshmen Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her radical, reckless, oh-so-woke socialist policies: At what point would you say her scam of pushing an oppressive, economy-killing policy on the rest of us, while using Congress as a sweet, sweet grift opportunity for she and her boyfriend will begin to rub you the wrong way?

So back on February 21 I wrote about AOC’s full belly-flop into the swamp, as she set up a plush love nest for she and her boyfriend, Riley Roberts, in a ritzy section of Washington, D.C.

A few of you objected to my pointing out that she’d appointed Roberts as a staffer, along with a few other uncomfortable details.

While we talk about her behind the scenes wheeling and dealing, we can’t forget about her Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti.

Chakrabarti was most vocal in defending AOC’s shady campaign activities.

Chakrabarti owns a PAC called Brand New Congress, associated with Justice Democrats, an organization formed by Chakrabarti and Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur.

I covered that, also, on February 20. From that piece:

At the beginning of 2017, Chakrabarti created Brand New Congress, an organization dedicated to shaking things up in Democratic primaries. It’s a rather ingenious organization, but one that dwells in a legal gray-area as far as campaign finance law is concerned. It facilitates campaigns on shoestring budgets by providing a single clearinghouse for campaign services, generally filed under the banner of “strategic consulting”. But, as a result, it limits the meaningfulness of FEC disclosures by those campaigns. Additionally, it means that Brand New Congress, unlike most PACs, spends most of its budget on overhead and makes relatively few actual contributions to candidates.

Additionally, Brand New Congress is not one thing, but rather two. It’s a nonqualified political action committee — a PAC — that can raise and bundle campaign contributions for candidates. Donations and expenditures from PACs, like those to and by candidates, are publicly disclosed. However, Brand New Congress is also a LLC, owned by Chakrabarti, that provides campaign services to candidates to help lower the barriers to entry. LLCs do not have to disclose or itemize their spending.

This is a clever way to try to make running for office easier and to place a lot of small bets on a lot of insurgent candidates and hope for a few lucky wins. And that pretty much seems to be what happened.

Over the course of the cycle, Justice Democrats would pay Brand New Congress LLC $605,849.12. They would also share an address. In May, Brand New Congress changed the address for its custodian of records to 714 South Gay Street in Knoxville, TN. In August, it switched addresses again, but in December of 2017, Justice Democrats registered at the address. AOC also used the Knoxville address in her first candidate filing, which incorrectly registered her to run in New York’s 15th Congressional District.

Brand New Congress ended up paying $261,165.20 over the course of AOC’s campaign, with several of its largest “consulting” payments made to – Riley Roberts, who now lives with AOC as her “partner.”

Ok, so that was the first bit of news, so let’s get back to Chakrabarti, the wealthy donor who received a top spot in AOC’s office, as what can only be deemed a “reward” for his efforts.

A complaint was filed against Saikat Chakrabarti on Monday with the FEC, claiming he illegally funneled a hefty $1 million to several companies that he owned.

Saikat Chakrabarti set up Brand New Congress PAC to collect and bundle donations for newbie politicians including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. He then diverted more than $1 million into two of his companies that did campaign work, skirting reporting requirements, said the complaint by the National Legal and Policy Center.

“These are not minor or technical violations. We are talking about real money here,” said Tom Anderson, director of NLPC’s Government Integrity Project. “In all my years of studying FEC reports, I’ve never seen a more ambitious operation to circumvent reporting requirements.”

I mean, is he distributing that money evenly to the people, setting up affordable housing for the unwashed masses, as is the proclaimed goal of the great socialist princess, AOC?

I’m confused as to how this is in line with her vision, at least, the line she feeds to the gullible rubes that support her.

This isn’t even the only FEC complaint that has been filed.

The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed a complaint last week, based on what they call a scheme to funnel those PAC funds to the boyfriend.

“The timing and amounts of these transactions, the use of two affiliated entities as intermediaries, the vague and amorphous nature of the services Riley ostensibly provided, the magnitude of these transactions compared to both the limited funds the campaign had raised at the time and the total amount of its expenditures, and the romantic relationship between Ocasio-Cortez and Riley collectively establish reason to believe these transactions may have violated campaign finance law,” said the complaint.

This is quite the ugly distortion of her stated principles, if proven true.

And while AOC struts around, calling herself “the boss,” she may very well see herself referred to as “co-defendant” in a federal corruption case, before she manages to get a half term under her designer belt.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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Saikat Chakrabarti

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