If progressives claim to care about ethical behavior, this ain't it.
A top staffer from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's campaign team has been accused of doing something incredibly dishonest with over a million dollars in political donations.
AOC's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, who was recently photographed eating a hamburger after telling the world to give up beef, may have funneled over $1 million in political donations to his own private companies, according to a new complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Washington Examiner 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 cash transfers from the PACs — overseen by Saikat Chakrabarti, the freshman socialist Democrat's chief of staff — run counter to her pledges to increase transparency and reduce the influence of "dark money" in politics.
Chakrabarti's companies appear to have been set up for the sole purpose of obscuring how the political donations were used.
Would Trump's national emergency really be an "emergency"?
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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.
Sounds like AOC and her hamburger-eating chief of staff are knee-deep in a career-ending scandal.