AOC’s Chief of Staff, Radical Communist Saikat Chakrabarti
According to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Committee Monday (FEC), two PACs founded by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s top aide, Saikat Chakrabarti funneled over $ 1 million in political donations into two of his own private companies, reported the Washington Examiner.
So much for Ocasio-Cortez’s promise to reduce “dark money” in politics!
According to a complaint filed by government watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center, it appears Chakrabarti set up his two companies for the sole purpose of hiding how the donations were used.
The Washington Examiner reported:
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 like 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.
The complaint names Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Saikat Chakrabarti and asks the FEC to investigate and audit the two PACs alleging they were engaged in “an elaborate scheme to avoid proper disclosure of campaign expenditures,” reported the Examiner.
“It appears Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her associates ran an off-the-books operation to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, thus violating the foundation of all campaign finance laws: transparency,” Director of National Legal Policy Center Tom Anderson said.
Chakrabarti founded the two PACs in question in 2016 and 2017.
Brand New Congress was founded in 2016 and Justice Democrats was founded in 2017 with the end goal of getting ultra progressive candidates elected to Congress — ultimately these two PACs helped radical Communist Ocasio-Cortez win a Congressional seat last November.
The Washington Examiner explains how Chakrabarti set up the PACs and his shell companies to move the money around in secret:
In 2016 and 2017, Chakrabarti’s PACs raised around $3.3 million for the project, primarily from small donors. During this time, the committees transferred over $1 million to two shell companies controlled by Chakrabarti with names similar to one of the PACs, Brand New Campaign LLC and Brand New Congress LLC, according to federal election filings.
A few weeks after starting the Brand New Congress PAC, Chakrabarti formed one of the companies, Brand New Campaign LLC, in Delaware, using a registered agent service and mailbox-only address.
Over the next seven months, as small-dollar political donations poured into the PAC from progressives across the country, the committee transferred over $200,000, 82 percent of the contributions, to the company Brand New Campaign LLC. The payments were for “strategic consulting,” according to federal election filings. They were sent to an apartment address listed for Chakrabarti in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan.
In 2017, Brand New Congress PAC transferred another $240,000 to Brand New Congress LLC, also for “strategic consulting.” Another PAC co-founded by Chakrabarti that year called “Justice Democrats” transferred an additional $605,000 to Brand New Congress LLC in 2017.
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.”
Recall, AOC’s Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti is a radical Communist and a huge fan of Indian political leader Subhas Chandra Bose who was an ally of Adolf Hitler and Imperial Japan.
Ocasio-Cortez was lambasted by conservative media after her boyfriend’s name appeared on the House directory list — many speculated she put her boyfriend on payroll like a good Socialist.
“Nice to see her adapting to the swamp so quickly,” writer Luke Thompson said after discovering AOC’s boyfriend was designated as House staff a few weeks ago.
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