Organization With Ties To Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Faces Campaign Finance Scrutiny

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s close allies at Justice Democrats are under campaign finance scrutiny by the FEC after they gave potentially impermissible contributions to campaigns for the purpose of retiring debt. The only problem is that these campaigns had no debt to retire.

AOC and her current government chief of staff were until recently listed as a Governor of the Justice Democrats PAC, sparking questions of campaign finance issues. Her chief of staff faces separate campaign finance questions over political donations that were directed from PACs he controlled to two of his own private companies.

Courtesy of reporting from the Washington Free Beacon, the potentially improper contributions include:

“$1,211 to David Clark, who was a Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District; $324 to Greg Edwards, also a former Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s 7th District; $733 to Sameena Mustafa, who was a candidate in Illinois’s 5th District; $384 to Jennifer Marshall, who was a candidate in North Carolina’s 5th District; $281 to Ricardo Jose Trevino Jr., who was a candidate in Texas’s 23rd District; and $216 to Jimmy Darnell Jones, who ran in Texas’s 2nd district; among a handful of others.”

The letter comes as Ocasio-Cortez has increased her political activity in the Democratic presidential primary race. She has introduced legislation with Bernie Sanders and partnered with Elizabeth Warren to target Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, while also refusing to consider a debate of health care policy with contender John Delaney.

She also stepped into hot water last week by downplaying the luxury apartment she rents in Washington D.C.’s upscale Navy Yard neighborhood. The neighborhood was named the “most gentrified neighborhood” in Washington D.C. in a study by researchers at the University of Minnesota Law School.

AOC downplayed the building as she compared it to a public housing development she toured in New York City. The building AOC lives in does not offer affordable units under the city’s Affordable Dwelling Units program.

The building includes a “Peloton cycling studio and a yoga studio, a demonstration kitchen with a wood-fired pizza oven, private massage rooms with hydro massage beds, a golf simulator studio, a basketball court, a racquetball court, and a rooftop tennis court.”