Ocasio-Cortez struggles on Twitter to delegitimize the ethics complaints against her

This story begins with the Intercept reporting this week that the Federal Election Committee has leveled a $390,000 fine against the super PAC Right to Rise USA, which backed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, for accepting a $1.3 million campaign donation from a company controlled by two Chinese citizens. Right to Rise formerly employed Luke Thompson, who is one of the first people to ask questions about ethically dubious financial transactions between PACs and private companies co-founded by Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti.

Thompson discovered, for example, that the congresswoman’s campaign made payments in 2018 to Brand New Congress LLC for “strategic consulting.” Brand New Congress PAC then made payouts to Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend, Riley Roberts, who is billed as a “marketing consultant.” Both the LLC and the PAC were co-founded by Chakrabarti, who served formerly as Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign chairman. Thompson also found that that the congresswoman’s office had given her boyfriend a dot-gov email address. These addresses are reserved only for House staff, though they are given out on occasion to the spouses of elected members of Congress. Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend is still her boyfriend.

Since coming into office in January, the New York lawmaker has been hit with three ethics complaints, two alleging misuse of congressional funds and one alleging Chakrabarti oversees a glorified slush fund shielded from federal reporting requirements.

This is where Ocasio-Cortez’s smear campaign comes into play.

The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz promoted his reporting this week on the FEC fine against Right to Rise by tweeting: “Luke Thompson, the guy who kicked off the dumb campaign finance smears of [Ocasio-Cortez], used to work for the Jeb! super PAC Right to Rise USA.”

This is not wrong. Thompson used to work for Right to Rise — emphasis on “used to.” Thompson now hosts a podcast.

Ocasio-Cortez seized (or pounced?) on Schwarz’s tweet to go after Thompson personally.

“Whoah: the creepy org filing bogus ethics complaints against me just actually got hit with one of the biggest fines in FEC history,” her office tweeted, adding in a since-deleted follow-up, “(Rather, same guy – nor org, since they have a zillion shadow groups).”

Her office took another crack at it and tweeted, “(Rather same guy who operated at the org).”

It’s obvious Ocasio-Cortez’s team is looking to distract from their own ethics complaints by delegitimizing one of the first individuals to ask questions about Chakrabarti’s unorthodox accounting methods. But they could at least get some of the facts correct.

First, Right to Rise has not filed an ethics complaint against Ocasio-Cortez. The groups that have filed are the Coolidge-Reagan Foundation, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, and the National Legal and Policy Center.

Secondly, Thompson doesn’t work for any of these groups. He doesn’t even work for Right to Rise anymore.

Lastly, there’s nothing to show Thompson was ever involved in Right to Rise accepting the $1.3 million donation that resulted in its fine, or that he even knew anything about it.

Though news media have not yet criticized the congresswoman for smearing Thompson, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before our very brave and noble political press holds her to account for tweeting outright falsehoods to her more than 3.5 million Twitter followers. Any minute now, reporters and pundits will denounce the Democratic star for abusing her perch in Congress to slander a private citizen whose greatest sin is that he raised questions about how her office raises and disburses cash.

Just kidding! Not a chance.