Its complaint cites numerous posts from the Brand New Congress PAC’s website describing other services it rendered to candidates, including canvassing and fundraising, that don’t fit the FEC’s definition of consulting. It claims the payments to the LLC constituted an “extensive off-the-books operation” to influence federal elections.
The NLPC doesn’t say the payments violated contribution limits. “Our complaint kind of leads there but we wanted to make it ironclad by going with the most obvious violation,” Peter Flaherty, the NLPC chairman, said. He called the relationship between the congresswoman’s campaign, the PACs and the LLC "a bit of a tangle," and said his group might add to its complaint.
The campaign-in-a-box arrangement was abandoned at the end of August 2017, according to Mitrani, because it wasn’t sustainable with so many campaigns to manage. Candidates instead reimbursed the PACs directly for any services rendered. FEC records show Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign paid Justice Democrats $41,109 for various services.
Tweets and Blog
The Coolidge Reagan complaint is based on tweets and a blog post on Medium.com by Luke Thompson, a Republican campaign operative who worked for Right to Rise USA, the super political action committee that backed Jeb Bush’s presidential candidacy.
The FEC on March 8 fined that super-PAC $390,000 for soliciting a contribution from American Pacific International Capital Inc., a company controlled by Chinese nationals; it also fined the company $550,000. U.S. law bars contributions from foreign nationals.
“Whoah: the creepy org filing bogus ethics complaints against me just *actually* got hit with one of the biggest fines in FEC history,” a bemused Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, getting the organization, or “org” as she put it, behind the complaint wrong.
The NLPC complaint could fizzle, or amount to little more than a paperwork violation. But Ocasio-Cortez, who has called the campaign finance system “fundamentally broken” due to the influence of corporate PACs, proved herself adept at leveraging it in her own election effort.
This article provided by Bloomberg News.