Tag Archives: FEC

Campaign Finance Violations On Steroids

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Yesterday The Washington Examiner posted an article about some campaign finance violations by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti. The violations listed are not minor violations, there are some major amounts of money involved here.

The article reports:

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, according to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday.

…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.

PACs are required to disclose how and when funds are spent, including for expenditures such as advertisements, fundraising emails, donations to candidates, and payments for events and to vendors.

The private companies to which Chakrabarti transferred the money from the PACs are not subject to these requirements.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article for the details.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. Was it a rookie mistake or was it planned corruption? Is this coming out now because AOC has become a problem for the Democrats–she is so far left that she may cost them votes in 2020?

The article concludes:

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.”

Chakrabarti declined to comment on the FEC complaint or provide details about his companies’ financial activities. Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez, declined to comment.

Zeynab Day, communications director for the Brand New Congress PAC, said Chakrabarti was not currently affiliated with the group and that it recently went through a “transition period.” She referred questions about the LLC to Chakrabarti. “I’m unable to answer any questions about the LLC … I am not informed about them. We are not an affiliated group,” she said.

A spokesperson for Justice Democrats said he did not know why the PAC paid so much money to Chakrabarti’s LLCs. When asked what the Justice Democrats PAC does on a daily basis, he said, “It’s very clear what we do,” but declined to elaborate.

Chakrabarti founded Brand New Congress PAC, in April 2016. According to a statement released by Justice Democrats PAC last May, Chakrabarti “was the only controlling member” of the company Brand New Congress LLC and “took no salary.” The statement added: “Saikat is lucky to have a small side business that generates him enough income that he is able to do all of this work as a volunteer.”

If this story is accurately reported, it is bound to get more interesting!

About That Free Speech Thing

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Today’s Wall Street Journal posted an article about a Democrat effort to limit political donations by businesses after those donations were allowed by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating events that occurred under the previous chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Events similar to those at the Internal Revenue Service–senior officials rolling over career staff to politicize the agency–evidently also occurred at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The article reports:

Last year politicians like then-Rep. Barney Frank and liberal tax-exempt groups like Public Citizen were encouraging the SEC to demand more disclosure from public companies about the organizations they support. Staff for Mr. Frank specifically told the SEC that, “There is particular interest in what the authority is for disclosure of 501(c)(4) contributions (political contributions).” Mr. Frank’s staff also noted that the interest was coming from the House Democratic leadership.

A former Democratic Congressman gave the political motive away while lobbying the SEC’s then-chairman Mary Schapiro. The former lawmaker, unnamed in a memorandum accompanying the Issa letter, was asked by Ms. Schapiro why this wasn’t a job for the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The former pol responded, “because the FEC is even more broken than you,” according to a May 2012 email sent by the deputy director of the SEC’s division of corporation finance. Democrats couldn’t get what they wanted out of the Congress or the FEC. So they went to the SEC.

This sort of behavior is unacceptable. Hopefully the House Oversight Committee will be able to hold the people who initiated this sort of illegal political activity accountable.

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When Government Takes Up Bullying

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One of the dangers of oversized government is the impact it has on the average citizen. Another danger is that government can become a bully to people it disagrees with. It is becoming very obvious that the current administration has no problem using the government to bully people who do not agree with administration policies.

The National Review posted a story yesterday about emails between the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) regarding conservative political groups.

The article reports:

The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American Future Fund, before recommending that the commission prosecute it for violations of campaign-finance law. Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s exempt-organizations division, worked at the FEC from 1986 to 1995, and was known for aggressive investigation of conservative groups during her tenure there, too.

Under Rule 6103, the IRS is prohibited from sharing confidential taxpayer information, but the e-mail suggests that Lois Lerner may have shared the information in spite of the law.

There is a pattern to these “:phony scandals.” All of them include an arrogance on the part of the Executive Branch of our government that simply ignores both the law and Congressional oversight. There seems to be an element of corruption that has leaked into a number of areas in the Executive Branch. The Congress needs to hold the people who broke the law accountable.

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