Friday, March 22, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Insanity, Part 5: Possible Campaign Law Violations, Possible Pay Law Violations and A Downward Favorability Trend

Over the past few months, New York City Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has established herself as a human gaffe machine. Her inability to do simple math, her outlandish ideas based on an alternative reality, her economic ignorance, and lack of common sense has resulted in an almost daily stream of idiocy, inane comments, and ridiculous ideas that have no basis in reality.

As a result, most of our recent political class insanity posts have almost always had an Ocasio-Cortez piece of insanity. Thus, we have decided to separately track her craziness and idiotic takes on economics, business, government, and whatever else on a regular basis under its own set of posts. She deserves to have a separate effort that captures all of the ridiculousness she espouses.

The original format we were going to use was to start with a set of her original inane ideas and just continue to build on that initial list as time goes by. But after just three summaries of her idiocy and stupid ideas it has become obvious that we cannot continually add to the existing set of ineptness, that list would get too large too quickly.

Thus, each new Ocasio-Cortez post will have only the latest gaffes out of her mouth. To review her previous idiocies just enter her last name in the search box above. The latest post can be accessed at:


Let’s get started:

1) While we may laugh or shake our head at some of the many inane and idiotic statements this Congresswoman makes, she may have gotten herself into some serious law breaking areas as reported by several news sources, actions that could eventually lead to jail time under campaign financing laws:
  • The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) has filed a formal FEC complaint that alleges campaign finance law breaking by Ocasio-Cortez.
  • Specifically, the NLPC complaint alleges that she and her top aide, Saikat Chakrabarti, operated an “elaborate scheme to avoid proper disclosure of campaign expenditures.”
  • Chakrabarti is a millionaire who is the founder of the Brand New Congress PAC and a group called “Justice Democrats.
  • The complaint demands that the FEC conduct an investigation into whether Chakrabarti channeled $885,000 from his two PACs into two shell companies he owned which may have allowed Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign to receive campaign donations that exceeded what was legal.
  • PACs are required by law to disclose how and when their campaign donations are spent but private companies are excluded from that requirement which may mean that the two shell companies were set up explicitly to hide and bypass the PAC disclosure requirements.
  • According to former FEC official, Adav Noti: “It does seem like there’s something amiss. 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.”
  • Furthermore, “One possibility – a strong possibility, based on the description they put out – is they just got really bad legal advice that somehow said they had to to do this,” he continues. “But regardless, when they decided to use the PAC form, which they did, they subjected themselves to all the legal requirements that come with that.’
  • According to former FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky: “If the facts as alleged are true, and a candidate had control over a PAC that was working to get that candidate elected, then that candidate is potentially in very big trouble and may have engaged in multiple violations of federal campaign finance law, including receiving excessive contributions.”
  • Thus, both Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti could face jail time if they intentionally hid information about her campaign and the PACs to avoid campaign contribution limits.
  • In addition, it appears that both of them may not have informed the FEC that they both controlled the Justice Democrats group that was supporting her election campaign.
Great: stupid ideas and possible criminal activity to boot.

2) And campaign finance entanglements might not be the only illegal financial hanky panky she is covering up. She has also been accused of purposefully underpaying her staff members to avoid Federal laws that require transparency of higher paid government employees. Director Tom Anderson of the NLPC notes that this “an old trick some of the most corrupt members of Congress have used time and again.” 

But not surprising since Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend may or may not be an employee on her staff and she definitely hired Saikat Chakrabarti onto her Congressional staff. 

3) She has made stupid statements like claiming that the three branches of government were the Presidency The House, and the Senate. She has showed her economic ignorance by not knowing the definition of the unemployment rate despite having an economics degree. She misread a simple Pentagon audit report and then claimed that the Pentagon had wasted more money than it ever had in its total budget. She made the most insane statements and assertions which drove Amazon to shut down the growth plans it had in her Congressional district, robbing that district of untold billions of dollars in tax revenue and economic growth.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that people are finally realizing what a screw up she is, as measured by a recent Gallup poll:
  • The good news for her is that when she won her primary election, about half of U.S. adults had no opinion of her or were unfamiliar with her but two months later only 29% of those polled had that opinion, i.e. a lot more people know who she is.
  • The bad news though is that 41% now hold an unfavorable opinion of her while only 31% hold a favorable opinion of her.
  • That 41% is up a whopping 15 points from her 26% unfavorable rating from last fall.
  • Obviously she is trending in the wrong direction, probably because every time she opens her mouth she says something that is wrong, a lie, a crime, or is incoherent. Of course, it is not her fault, she blames Fox News and old white guys for her drop in favorability ratings.
  • Problem is that old white guys don't make up anywhere close to 41% of the population or the Gallup sample, the percentage of those polled that view her unfavorably. And again, with her and with a lot of her generation, it is never her/their fault, not a good trait you want in a politician or a person of influence.

That will it for today for Ocasio-Cortez insanity: possible multiple violations of campaign laws and a fading favorability rating. Not a good day for the Congresswoman from NYC.


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