Pretend you’re a freshman lawmaker who perpetually rails against dark money — but your chief of staff has funneled $1 million-plus in political donations to two of his own companies, Brand New Congress LLC and Brand New Campaign LLC.
That’s the hypocritical pickle Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez finds herself in.
At a House hearing last month, AOC made a big show of “a lighting-round game” to wax indignant about what’s legal under the campaign laws. Yet she’s left arguing that the moves by her then-campaign manager and now chief of staff, millionaire Saikat Chakrabarti, were legal (however smelly).
It may not be legal, mind you: The watchdogs at the National Legal and Policy Center charge that Chakrabarti skirted reporting requirements and violated the $5,000 limit on donations from federal PACs to candidates.
“These are not minor technical violations. We are talking about real money here,” said NLPC’s Tom Anderson. “In all my years of studying FEC reports, I’ve never seen a more ambitious operation to circumvent reporting requirements.”
David Mitrani, a lawyer for the campaign and the PACs and LLCs (they all share the same lawyer!), claims the FEC doesn’t require disclosure of the embarrassing info.
There you go: It stinks, but the camp of Rep. “Get the dark money out of politics” is arguing that it’s OK because it’s not outright forbidden. Hypocrite.