A complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday alleges that two political action committees founded by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s top aide funneled over $1 million in political donations into two of his own private companies.
If true, the cash transfers from the PACs, which were overseen by Saikat Chakrabarti, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, would run counter to her pledges to increase transparency and reduce the influence of “dark money” in politics.
According to a report in the Washington Examiner:
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.
Campaign finance attorneys described the arrangement as “really weird” and an indication “there’s something amiss.” They said there was no way of telling where the political donations went — meaning they could have been pocketed or used by the company to pay for off-the-books campaign operations.
The private companies to which Chakrabarti transferred the money from the PACs are not subject to these requirements.
The complaint names Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti as respondents. It asks the FEC to investigate and audit the two PACs, saying they were engaged in an “an elaborate scheme to avoid proper disclosure of campaign expenditures.”
WIBC host Tony Katz covers Ocasio-Cortez’s alleged hypocrisy in today’s Popcorn Moment:
