The Federal Election Commission is examining financial discrepancies at a political action committee that was run by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after an outside watchdog group raised questions about the group’s spending activities.
Justice Democrats PAC, a committee where Ocasio-Cortez served on the board until last summer, said in financial reports that it helped pay off candidate debts that did not appear to exist, according to a May 30 letter from the FEC cited by the Washington Free Beacon.
The FEC asked the PAC to explain the discrepancies, request refunds from the campaigns that allegedly received the payments, and update its financial statements, noting that the commission “may take further legal action regarding this impermissible activity.”
Justice Democrat PAC’s financial report for April 1, 2018, to June 30, 2018, “discloses one or more contributions to federal candidates for the retirement of debts incurred by the 2018 Primary election campaign,” according to the FEC letter.
“[H]owever, it appears that the recipient committee(s) had insufficient debts to warrant such a contribution,” said the commission. “Please note that a committee may only designate contributions to retire a candidate’s debts if those debts exist.”
The FEC questioned the PAC’s payments to 11 Democratic campaigns, including Texas congressional candidates Ricardo Jose Trevino and Jimmy Darnell Jones, and Illinois congressional candidate Sameena Mustafa.
The commission also asked Justice Democrats to explain reimbursements it said it received from seven campaigns that did not correspond with any payments made by the PAC. The commission said the group must respond to the letter by July 5 or it could result in enforcement action.
Ocasio-Cortez has said she stepped down from the board of the Justice Democrats PAC at the end of June 2018 and would have still been part of the group’s leadership when most of the debt payments were made.
Her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, co-founded Justice Democrats and also served on the board.
Justice Democrats PAC did not respond to request for comment by press time. A spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez did not respond to request for comment by press time.
The Washington Examiner first reported that Justice Democrats and another PAC co-founded by Chakrabarti called Brand New Congress made payments of over $1 million to an LLC controlled by Chakrabarti. The National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, filed a complaint asking the FEC to investigate the payments.
The FEC has yet to indicate if it is pursuing an investigation of the NLPC complaint. But the Justice Democrats PAC’s payments to Chakrabarti’s company, which were described as consulting fees to help build infrastructure for Democratic campaigns, raised eyebrows with campaign finance experts. “None of that makes any sense,” said Adav Noti, the senior director of the Campaign Legal Center and a former FEC lawyer. “I can’t even begin to disentangle that. They’re either confused or they’re trying to conceal something.”
