Ocasio-Cortez Accused Of MULTIPLE Ethics Violations, Paying Boyfriend
Ocasio-Cortez Accused Of MAJOR Ethics Violation, Paying Boyfriend. Ocasio-Cortez's boyfriend was granted an official house email and people began to question if she hired her boyfriend. She denied this.But now questions are arising around payments her boyfriend Riley Roberts received while presumably living in Arizona. The payments came from the PAC that was supporting AOC and shortly after getting paid it is alleged that her boyfriend moved in with her in NYC, indirectly benefiting her.The far left candidate has denied any wrong doing and called this all lies and rumors. That may be the case but at any rate this does look like more DC swampy behavior. The criticism partly stems from the idea that the democratic socialist would oppose these types of behaviors.
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There's been an ongoing ethics scandal with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after it was discovered she got her boyfriend a house email address.
Many people claimed that only staffers can get these email addresses, and she pushed back saying, no, it's just for calendar access.
But following this, another story is emerging.
That a PAC that was supporting Cortez went to pay her boyfriend for two months of work a total of $6,000.
And the reason that's significant is that political action committees can only contribute $5,000 per year to a candidate.
The accusation is that this PAC paid her boyfriend $6,000 that indirectly benefited Cortez more than she was allowed to actually take in.
The story is ridiculously complicated, but I don't think there's anything necessarily unethical or illegal.
I think people might just be waking up to the swamp.
And that's actually some of the criticism here.
Not that she did anything wrong or illegal, but that politics in our country is a swamp of nepotism and paying your buddies and using multiple organizations for multiple reasons because of all of these legal issues and FEC rules.
People end up forming different companies and political action committees and money gets pushed around in ridiculous ways.
And it's just a swamp.
It really is.
So today, let's take a look at some of this criticism and try, at least to the best of my abilities, to break down what's actually going on here, and also look at some of the criticism Cortez has received because of the issue.
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This Medium post has started getting pushed around quite a bit.
From about three days ago, Luke Thompson writes, The post begins by talking about how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's boyfriend was granted a house email address, and how it lists him as incoming in this HouseNet database.
However, they pushed back saying this was simply for calendar access.
Later on in the post, it mentions how brand new Congress PAC paid her boyfriend, Riley Roberts, $3,000 on August 9th.
In fact, they paid him twice, on August 9th and September 29th, $3,000 each.
As I mentioned earlier, this is significant because a PAC can only contribute $5,000 per year to a candidate.
This was $6,000.
The accusation is that the PAC was paying her boyfriend to indirectly benefit her beyond what they were actually allowed to give her.
The Medium Post mentions that 18 days later, AOC's campaign paid Brand New Congress LLC, a separate organization, $6,191.32.
And we can see it's actually more than that several times.
She was paying Brand New Congress.
Now, according to Sycat Chakrabarty, there are two organizations, Brand New Congress LLC and Brand New Congress PAC.
In this comment, where Luke Thompson says, over the course of the cycle, Justice Democrats would pay Brand New Congress LLC $605,000.
And this is where it gets even more complicated.
Justice Democrats is a separate political action committee.
Sycott responded, correct.
All the staff were, at that point, employed by Brand New Congress LLC, because the staff was being shared between Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress PAC, and multiple campaigns.
$605,000 is not a lot of money to pay a full staff handling that much work.
As I mentioned in the Frequently Asked Questions, I never took a salary from either the LLC or the PACs.
If I was going to do a full breakdown of the two different political action committees and the Limited Liability Corporation, LLC, this video would be really, really long.
And admittedly, I started doing that, and once I got to around a half an hour, I said, this is way too complicated to actually get into.
What we're looking at, whether it's meant to be unethical or sneaky or otherwise, is the swamp.
Two different political action committees that are supporting various candidates and an LLC that is also supporting the candidates because of federal election laws.
In response to a comment from Luke Thompson, where he said, unlike in the other cases, Brand New Congress PAC turned around and paid her boyfriend as a marketing consultant, he said, This is false.
As you mention here, there are two separate entities.
AOC paid Brand New Congress LLC for services, which we charged for at cost.
These services included, among many other things, running her website, embedding staff with her campaign, running a phone banking system that she and all our candidates were able to use.
Brand New Congress PAC, a different entity, hired Riley to run a national digital fundraising campaign for Brand New Congress PAC.
He did that for two months, and we have proof of his work.
There were no payments from the LLC to the PAC, as you can clearly see in the FEC reports.
So there is no way for money AOC was paying to the LLC to have made its way back to Riley.
But what we can say is true is that the PAC did pay her boyfriend.
This is from Fox News.
PAC, aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, paid Boyfriend $6,000 for marketing work.
According to FEC reports, the PAC made two payments to Roberts, one in August 2017 and
one in September 2017, both for $3,000.
In a statement to Fox News, Brand New Congress's communications director Zainab Day said that
Roberts is a professional digital marketing and growth consultant who specializes in social
media presence and subscriber engagement, and his hiring was based on his experience
managing successful advertising and social media campaigns.
He was hired through a two-month trial period beginning on August 3, 2017, and worked through the end of September 2017, she added.
Services to the Brand New Congress pack consisted of advertising strategies for potential growth, Developing metrics and aiding in execution of strategy to increase brand awareness for the pack as a whole.
So here's my general understanding and keep in mind these details are extremely complicated.
The swamp in DC is... It's rather frustrating.
No money, according to Sycott Chakrabarty, went from the LLC to the PAC.
The PAC paid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's boyfriend.
But you have to recognize that there's still an individual associated with both groups.
Whether he's working for them or not, it's still a swamp.
Just because you don't officially work for an organization doesn't mean you can't act to benefit them.
Just because money doesn't directly flow from the LLC to the PAC doesn't mean they're not acting to benefit Ocasio-Cortez's boyfriend.
What makes this story interesting, in my opinion, is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's boyfriend was living in Arizona when he was reportedly paid, or at least they listed his state of residence as Arizona.
And then later, in 2017, he was able to move in with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
As pointed out in the Medium post, we can see that the payments were made to Roberts Riley, the state of Arizona.
A year later, October 15th, 2018, we saw this story.
From Vogue, how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other progressives are defining the midterms.
In the story, it notes that Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx, and it's where she lives now in a one-bedroom apartment with her boyfriend, Riley Roberts, an easygoing redhead who works in web development.
They add, Roberts, whom Ocasio-Cortez met in true nerdy fashion, she says at a weekly Friday afternoon conversation hosted by the dean at BU, he later moved from Arizona to be with her.
Sycat Chakrabarty commented on Medium saying Riley was living in Arizona until late 2017, which is why he lists Arizona as his residence.
It would be an assumption on my part, but if he lived there until late 2017, it would seem shortly after he was paid by Brand New Congress PAC, he then moved to New York, because it was claimed in the Vogue article he moved from Arizona to New York.
Sycat Chakrabarty mentions that on August 1st, 2017, I stepped down from running Brand New Congress PAC.
And we spent the next month doing a transition so that the two PACs could officially split.
This is in reference to Justice Democrats.
He adds, it was during this time that the new leadership at Brand New Congress decided to hire Reilly for two months to help them with digital fundraising, something Reilly does professionally and, I might add, is really good at.
But there are a few points I find questionable.
It was only about a week after Saikat says he stepped down that they paid Reilly $3,000.
But it was nearly two months later they paid him the final for his two-month trial period.
The other thing that I find rather questionable is that he mentions Riley is really good at his job.
And he says, for anyone who has worked at all in this space, you know that $3,000 a
month for running a Facebook ads program for National Pack is an extremely reasonable rate.
If he was so good at his job, why did he only work the two-month trial period?
Perhaps he just needed some money to be able to move to New York.
I'm not here to question the intentions of what they were doing.
I think it's fairly obvious that when people are starting some kind of venture, they hire their friends because it's typically who they know.
They can't hire people they don't know, and if they know someone who can do the job, they'll just hire them.
Unfortunately, it does look rather swampy.
They claim he was good at his job.
Riley was.
They hired him for a two-month trial period.
After two months, he left.
About a week after Sycat steps down, they pay Riley $3,000.
So did they pay Riley up front?
If that's the case, why did they pay him at the end of September?
Maybe it was just an irregular payment.
It doesn't have to be on a schedule.
But then he only works over two months.
And then at some point in late 2017, he presumably moved to New York because, at least according to Vogue in a statement from Sycat, it sounds like her boyfriend moved in late 2017 from Arizona to New York to live with Ocasio-Cortez.
You could argue that now that he's living with Cortez, he is helping supplement her income, and she did indirectly benefit from a political action committee giving her boyfriend a job.
Is that unethical or illegal?
I don't believe it is.
I've talked to some people.
I don't entirely know, but it's definitely swampy.
Is it a bad thing?
I don't think it's necessarily that bad.
I think people are just waking up to how politics works.
You form an LLC, two different political action committees, money is going up, down, left, and right.
Someone's boyfriend who's living in Arizona gets a job for two months on a trial period where he's supposed to be good at it, but then two months later he is no longer working for them, and then he moves to New York.
It is what it is.
I think you're going to see conservatives raising an issue about this because they don't like Cortez for a lot of reasons.
And you're going to see the left defending or saying nothing she did is unethical or wrong.
And in fact, in response to the email scandal in the first place, you have the left and the right butting heads on whether or not she was allowed to give him this email address.
In the story from Fox News, they have two statements.
One from the spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer, David O'Boyle, telling Fox News that, from time to time at the request of members, spouses and partners are provided house email accounts for the purposes of viewing the members' calendar.
But they also have another statement from Jason Chaffetz who said,
If I was going to make an assumption, I would say that they have been friends for a long time,
Riley wanted to live with her.
He needed some money.
So they offered him up this job.
He took the job, worked for the two-month trial period.
They claim he was good at it, but I think it's irrelevant considering he left basically after the two months, and then at some point just after that moved to New York.
So it's very convenient.
They hired him, paid him six grand, and he was able to then move In with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She is indirectly benefiting from that job he received from the PAC, but I don't know if that's against any rules.
It's just politics.
So I guess I'll leave it there.
Admittedly, it's a really complicated story and I don't know if I have I'll put this disclaimer in there, a lot of this information may be incorrect.
I tried to go off the statements from Sycat Chakrabarty, as well as official reporting, but look, admittedly it's really complicated.
And because so many people were talking about it, I thought I would try to dig in and understand this.
But look, to really break down why there were two packs and an LLC is extremely complicated, I don't know if they did anything wrong, and again, I'll say it, I think the reason these packs existed was because they were in line with the law.
It makes sense.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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