AOC’s Chief Of Staff Accused Of Illegally Funneling Money Via A $1 Million ‘Slush Fund’

Well well well.

Perhaps you saw yesterday that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez started speaking in triplicate when discussing how she’s gonna go looking for a yet-to-be-determined crime that Donald Trump has committed by looking at his taxes taxes taxes and bank accounts bank accounts bank accounts and financial statements statements statements.  Here’s a refresher.

.@AOC: “While [President Trump’s] talking collusion, collusion, collusion, I think, in Oversight, we should be talking about taxes, taxes, taxes, and his bank account, his bank account, his bank account. His financial statements, statements, statements.” pic.twitter.com/dzyr9qhZJN

— The Hill (@thehill) March 4, 2019

OMG. The amount that I loathe her is fast approaching Ashley Judd levels and for those of you who’ve been around awhile, you know that’s really saying something.

Anyway, according to the sourcelink above, not everything is on the up and up when it comes to AOC’s own financial statements statements statements.

The National Legal and Policy Center’s Government Integrity Project, a watchdog group, has issued a complaint with the FEC that AOC’s top aide, her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti, funneled around a million bucks from a PAC that he managed to his own companies. He set up a PAC called Brand New Congress, the goal of which was to essentially get socialists into Congress, and then ALSO set up an LLC called Brand New Congress, moving money from the former to the latter so that he could avoid disclosing details about how the money was spent.

And now? AOC is trying to distance herself from him, telling the Washington Times, “He’s not on my payroll. They were not working for me and they are two separate entities here. This is the difference between an LLC and a PAC.”

As you know, AOC is an expert on things, so….you can trust her on this. Never mind the fact that her campaign paid that same LLC for “strategic consulting.” Nothing to see here.

Curious – how is it that her chief of staff isn’t on her payroll?

Anyway, since there are no reporting requirements for the LLC, there’s no way of knowing how that money was spent – and this is money from regular people – donations to her campaign. That money might have partly gone to her fancy white SOTU dress, for all we know.

The FEC complaint names AOC in addition to Chakrabarti, claiming that they were “engaged in an an elaborate scheme to avoid proper disclosure of campaign expenditures.”

Yikes.

According to the Washington Times, here’s how the whole operation went down:

A few weeks after starting the Brand New Congress PAC, Chakrabarti formed one of the companies, Brand New Campaign LLC, in Delaware, using a registered agent service and mailbox-only address.

Over the next seven months, as small-dollar political donations poured into the PAC from progressives across the country, the committee transferred over $200,000, 82 percent of the contributions, to the company Brand New Campaign LLC. The payments were for “strategic consulting,” according to federal election filings. They were sent to an apartment address listed for Chakrabarti in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan.

In 2017, Brand New Congress PAC transferred another $240,000 to Brand New Congress LLC, also for “strategic consulting.” Another PAC co-founded by Chakrabarti that year, Justice Democrats, transferred an additional $605,000 to Brand New Congress LLC in 2017.

Maybe I shouldn’t say this out loud, but I hope this is all as shady as it seems, and that she is subject to all kinds of consequences, because I loathe her with the fury of a billion suns. She wants to go after Trump for made-up phony crap? She might want to clean up her own house first.