Ocasio-Cortez HIT With FOURTH Ethics Complaint after a group said her providing her boyfriend Riley Roberts with a house.gov email address broke the rules. This is the fourth complaint we have seen in the past week or so with several complaints over campaign finance and internet use.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is definitely facing an uphill battle by challenging Republicans and Democrats alike so it is entirely possible this is just extreme scrutiny to push back on her rapidly growing brand. However, at the same time these complaints are not completely without merit and it is entirely possible that AOC and her staff have repeatedly broke the rules and campaign finance laws.Is this wave of complaints simple opposition to her far left policies and calls for social justice? Or have people actually found hypocrisy and wrongdoing from the Democratic Socialist Candidate?
Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now facing four separate complaints.
Two complaints were filed with the Federal Election Commission over mishandling funds or misreporting funds, and there have been two complaints to the Office of Congressional Ethics over her email use and her Twitter use.
Now, she's only been in office for a few months, so this seems to be a huge amount of scrutiny for a new member of Congress, but she is probably the most famous Democrat now, with over 3 million followers.
Many people are wondering, has she actually done anything wrong, or Is it just that she's going up against the machine?
Cortez is absolutely an outsider.
And she's facing down and even threatening some Democrats with removing them from office using primary techniques.
And she's very clearly made the conservatives angry with her far-left proposals.
Now whether or not she's actually done anything wrong is going to be up to the committees that have received the complaints.
But sure enough, it looks like some media outlets are trying to downplay the fact that people are actually complaining.
So today, let's go through these various complaints and look at some of the criticism over how the media has actually handled this.
But before we get started, make sure you're following me over on Mines at Mines.com slash Timcast.
We also set up a distributed newsroom at Mines.com slash Subverse, where we want you to get involved and share stories you think aren't being highlighted enough.
If you want to support these videos, just share them on social media to help spread the message.
The first story came around the end of February, this from the New York Post.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's campaign may have illegally paid her boyfriend.
The Coolidge Reagan Foundation alleged in the complaint that brand new Congress PAC paid Ocasio-Cortez's boyfriend, Riley Roberts, for marketing services after the PAC was hired by her campaign.
Using the third-party PAC to pay her boyfriend, May have violated campaign finance laws, a lawyer for the Coolidge Reagan Foundation told the Post.
It is totally legal as a candidate to hire family members, people you know to work for you.
But they didn't do that.
Instead of paying him directly, they paid him through an intermediary.
In order to obscure the fact that they paid him, the FEC should investigate and find out if that's the case.
That's the allegation, Becker added.
However, the issue here is that shortly after AOC's Chief of Staff Sycat Chakrabarti stepped down from the PAC, They then hired and almost immediately paid her boyfriend $3,000.
About two months later, they paid him another $3,000.
And then at some point shortly after that, he moved to New York from Arizona to be with Ocasio-Cortez.
It definitely seems like this may have been a way for them to get some money to her boyfriend so he could then move to New York to be with her.
Seems like personal use of campaign funds.
But there is more.
This story from only a few days ago, Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff illegally moved $885,000 in campaign contributions off the books, according to an FEC complaint.
The FEC complaint asserts that Chakrabarty established two PACs, the Brand New Congress PAC and the Justice Democrats PAC, and then systematically transferred more than $885,000 in contributions received by those PACs to Brand New Campaign LLC and the Brand New Congress LLC, companies that, unlike PACs, are exempt from reporting all of their significant expenditures.
The PACs claimed the payments were for strategic consulting.
Although large financial transfers from PACs to LLCs are not necessarily improper, the complaint argues that the goal of the extensive scheme was seemingly to illegally dodge detailed legal reporting requirements of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which are designed to track campaign expenditures.
It appears strategic consulting was a mischaracterization of a wide range of activities that should have been reported individually, the complaint states.
In response to the story, Ocasio-Cortez denies dark money allegations in FEC complaint.
There is no violation.
There is no violation, Ocasio-Cortez exclusively told Fox News after landing Tuesday at Ronald
Reagan National Airport.
Asked if the complaint shows she was connected to dark money during the campaign, she replied,
no, no.
A response from the Justice Democrat says, "...the only way to do work for multiple candidates legally
at this scale is to create an LLC and act as a vendor."
However, critics said the arrangement appears unusual and should be probed.
It sounds to a lot of people like this is a way to skirt the campaign finance laws in this country, former Utah GOP Rep Jason Chaffetz said on Fox News.
And the FEC and the other regulators need to get in there and find out where was this money going?
Was it going to people's pockets?
Was it legitimate or not?
Some suggested the complaint could indicate hypocrisy from Democrats who have railed against dark money in politics.
A video last month of Ocasio-Cortez firing off questions about dark money and campaign finance laws Two experts during a congressional hearing has been viewed about 40 million times, reportedly making it the most watched political video posted on Twitter.
Representative Ocasio-Cortez has been quite vocal in condemning so-called dark money, but her own campaign went to great lengths to avoid the sunlight of disclosure.
Tom Anderson, the director of NLPC's Government Integrity Project, said in a statement, I gotta say, it definitely feels like she is facing down the opposition from the establishment.
There are mainstream conservatives who are saying what she did is unusual and wrong and should be probed.
A lot of people are pointing to this as evidence that they're hypocrites.
While it may be true that it's unusual, it's also entirely possible it was the only way that Justice Democrats could actually try and campaign with many different candidates and not just one person.
However, If they really do believe in transparency, there's absolutely no reason for them not to publish their expenditures.
If LLCs aren't required to publish, they can still uphold their own standard of transparency and say, look, if it's the only way you are allowed to do this, then...
You should volunteer and publish your expenses so that people know you're not playing silly games or doing something unethical.
It's that simple.
Simply because you're not obligated to doesn't mean you shouldn't, especially if it's your principles calling on transparency and condemning dark money.
If we're gonna say it was just an unusual tactic and it's above board, then by all means play by your own rules.
Unsurprisingly, though, we're seeing NBC News absolutely take a side, running this story.
A conservative group alleges Ocasio-Cortez and her allies ran a PAC scam, but there's no evidence of wrongdoing.
While the structure of campaign and its vendors might be confusing, it's not illegal, campaign
finance experts said.
However, this is an entirely loaded article which I'm rather surprised to see.
They didn't allege she ran a PAC scam.
That would imply they were trying to funnel money from a political action committee to
an LLC to profit for themselves.
The allegation, as far as I understand, is just claiming something unusual happened and
should be probed, while they're not necessarily asserting what she was or wasn't doing.
And then to go on to say there's no evidence of wrongdoing, well, hold on.
There's evidence of unusual activity that should be probed to determine whether or not there's wrongdoing.
Of course there's no evidence of wrongdoing yet, they haven't done an investigation.
And the FEC hasn't responded.
In fact, The Daily Caller, which is a conservative outlet, responded to this by saying, Media ignores, mishandles allegations of campaign finance violations by Ocasio-Cortez.
They say, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported Monday that Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff retained control of the Justice Democrats PAC, which is credited with propelling Ocasio-Cortez to victory while running to unseat incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley in 2018.
Former FEC Commissioner told the DCNF that if Ocasio-Cortez's campaign was operating in affiliation with the PAC, the former bartender could be opened up to a massive reporting violation.
The report also noted that Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff did not disclose their control of Justice Democrats to the FEC.
Experts say it could be a felony if Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff knowingly and intentionally withheld this information to skirt campaign contribution limits.
Pax and campaigns must share a contribution limit when being controlled by the same person or group of persons.
The media has ignored the explosive allegation, instead lumping it in with a complaint to the FEC that Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff funneled nearly $1 million from Pax he controlled to private LLCs that he also controlled.
That complaint was outlined in a report by the Washington Examiner, but is a separate issue from the allegations laid out by the DCNF.
They added that NBC had to issue a correction on their fact check after an inquiry from an editor at the DCNF, but still did not accurately characterize the DCNF's reporting.
A lawyer for Ocasio-Cortez confirmed to the Washington Post, Ocasio-Cortez had legal control of Justice Democrats PAC until June 30, 2018, a central claim in the DCNF's reporting, but the Post opted not to mention that to their readers.
Other outlets didn't bother to mention the DCNF report or its implications, including Business Insider, ABC News, and CNN.
Ocasio-Cortez has brushed aside both the FEC complaint and the suggestion that she could face jail time.
So what we're actually looking at is four separate complaints, but an additional accusation that she may have had illegal control over a PAC or violated campaign contributions, and may actually face criminal penalties if they determine it was intentional.
But now let's move to the ethics complaints, and this has to do primarily with her boyfriend and her use of social media.
The Daily Caller reported, Ethics group to file house complaint on Ocasio-Cortez's Twitter use.
They allege Ocasio-Cortez's political Instagram account contains direct links to her House Instagram account and includes a link for political contributions, alongside posts of official video footage on the House floor, according to the complaint.
Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust plans to file Thursday with the Office of Congressional Ethics.
The group claims that these actions violate House ethics rules.
And then we have the latest ethics complaint.
Ocasio-Cortez hit with new ethics complaint over boyfriend's email account.
A conservative group that filed a complaint with the FEC alleging Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's campaign may have illegally funneled thousands of dollars through an allied PAC to boyfriend Riley Roberts on Thursday lodged a fresh complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics.
The new filing also concerns the famous congresswoman's boyfriend, but focuses on his use of a congressional email account.
The complaint alleges Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez improperly converted U.S.
House resources to her non-official personal use by obtaining an official mail.house.gov email address for her boyfriend, despite the fact he was not employed by her congressional office.
Moreover, it appears she obtained the email address for him by falsely designating him a staff member.
Attorneys for the foundation allege that Ocasio-Cortez violated restrictions on personal use of house services and equipment, as outlined in the House Ethics Manual.
They maintain that the provision of an official house-based email address for Roberts is a violation of rules that prevent outside individuals from having an official account.
This article includes a statement from Ocasio-Cortez's attorneys, saying,
Justice Democrats and brand new Congress PAC sought to implement a national program to
recruit non-traditional candidates for United States House of Representatives and Senate,
and to support them with an infrastructure to effectively run their campaigns as integrated
national effort, so the candidates could focus on being candidates that could best represent
their communities, as opposed to solely focus on high-dollar fundraising and national endorsements
to drive electoral success.
Based on this concept, Brand New Campaign, LLC, eventually renamed as Brand New Congress, LLC, was formed to serve as a campaign-in-a-box, a one-stop vendor for communications, field, online organizing, fundraising, and the like.
Specifically for the purpose of providing those services to brand new Congress PAC, Justice Democrats PAC, and the various candidates that those committees supported.
Snopes actually does provide a rather balanced view, saying that there are legitimate reasons for these complaints, but they do have an official statement addressing them.
But I think my point from earlier stands.
If it's true that this was the only way they could be a one-stop shop for several different candidates, and I can totally respect that, then I would ask them to just follow normal reporting protocols as if you actually had to.
You may not be required to, but why don't you just be transparent and then show us where the money was spent?
I definitely want to stress that we're seeing a lot of push from conservatives on this, and absolutely, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is facing down the establishment, be it mainstream Republicans or Democrats.
She has absolutely picked a fight with the machine.
I don't care if you think she's crazy, smart, stupid, whatever.
I don't care if you don't like her politics or do like her politics.
The fact of the matter is, When new people try to fight back, this is what happens.
In a certain respect, Donald Trump has faced absolute resistance from the left in a very similar way.
And once again, I will state that Ocasio-Cortez faces very similar problems that Trump does.
And I'm not saying you have to like them.
I'm not saying either is right or wrong.
But the point is, when you challenge the establishment, this is what you are going to see.
But let me know what you think about this.
Do you think she is doing something wrong?
Or do you think it's just people trying to push back on her Because she's a new upstart.
You can follow me on Mines at Timcast.
Stay tuned, new videos every day at 4 p.m.
Eastern on this channel, and more videos coming up on my second channel, YouTube.com slash Timcast News, starting at 6 p.m.
