Saikat Chakrabarti, the chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just resigned. As her top aide, he was also under investigation for campaign finance violations, including the creation of two PACs that seemed to be operating illegally.
He is being accused of setting up two companies, where roughly $1 million was funneled, in order to profit and possibly skirt campaign disclosure requirements.
This points to one absurdity of the current system: Hefty financial transfers from PACs to private LLCs are not necessarily improper, and many shadowy political operatives skip the PACs completely to run political money through LLCs to eliminate the voters' right to know what special interest is paying for the nasty attack ads they run.
In this case, the original complaint was filed with the FEC in March by the conservative National Legal and Policy Center based in Virginia. It said that Chakrabarti appeared to have "orchestrated an extensive off-the-books operation to make hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenditures in support of multiple candidates for federal office." The complaint said that the purpose of the "extensive" scheme was evidently to avoid detailed reporting requirements of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971.
AOC staff departure highlights the problem of corruption in Washington
AOC in Austin by Ståle Grut / NRKbeta is licensed under Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Source:
Washington Examiner
AOC in Austin by Ståle Grut / NRKbeta is licensed under Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.