'High Swamp Score': Looks like AOC's got some serious 'splaining to do about her campaign finances

Sarah D | 4:28 PM on March 04, 2019

Let’s talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign finances, campaign finances, campaign finances:

Two PACs founded by @AOC's top aide funneled over $1 million in political donations into two of his own private companies, according to a new FEC complaint. https://t.co/ISH8KjDoec

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 4, 2019

AOC’s chief of staff ran $1M slush fund by diverting campaign cash to his own companies https://t.co/XS4cMug0Ha

— Alex Rosenwald (@AlexRosenwald) March 4, 2019

BREAKING: Two PACs founded by AOC's top aide funneled $1+ million in political donations into two of his own private companies, new FEC complaint says

AOC also enacted a policy for her office that allows her staff to avoid public financial disclosure lawshttps://t.co/2rq7fQFb3r

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 4, 2019

More from the Washington Examiner:

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.

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.

…

“It does seem like there’s something amiss. I can only think of really two likely possibilities for this sort of pattern of disbursements,” said [Adav Noti, the senior director of the Campaign Legal Center and a former FEC lawyer]. “One is the scam PAC possibility — they’re really just paying themselves and they’re concealing it by using the LLC. The other is that there’s actually another recipient, that the money is going to the LLC and then being disbursed in some other way that they want to conceal.”