Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff might have broken campaign finance - laws Posted: Mar 3rd, 2019 - 11:07 am
The most powerful person in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office is a tech millionaire with homes in the West Village and Maryland, who is behind a set of inter-related companies raising ethical eyebrows with good-government groups.
Saikat Chakrabarti, 33, is the hard-left freshman’s chief of staff — the brains behind initiatives like the Green New Deal and the founder of a trio of companies that catapulted Ocasio-Cortez into Congress.
But those companies raise red flags with government-watchdog groups who say Chakrabarti may have skirted campaign finance law.
Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign paid Justice Democrats, a Tennessee-based PAC founded by Chakrabarti, a total of $41,108.59 for “campaign services” and “strategic consulting” in 2017 and 2018, Federal Election Commission filings show.
But PACs are not vendors and cannot provide more than $5,000 a year worth of services for any single candidate, according to FEC regulations. If candidates go above this amount, they need to seek advice directly from the FEC.
“They believe their cause is so great that they don’t have to play by the rules,” said Tom Anderson, who heads up the Government Integrity Project at the National Legal and Policy Center in Virginia, a conservative watchdog group. “They believe that they are above campaign finance law.”
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