Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slams 'bogus ethics complaints' over political donations

Lawmaker tweets 'this is how the misinformation machine works, folks' after misleading finance complaint against her campaign

Chris Riotta
New York
Friday 08 March 2019 16:54 GMT
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: House Oversight Committee should be focusing on President Trump's finances

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has rebuked a complaint filed with the Federal Elections Commission by a conservative group claiming her 2018 election campaign was in violation of campaign finance laws.

The freshman Democrat responded on Thursday night to the complaint filed this week by the National Legal and Policy Centre in a tweet.

“In case you saw the conspiracy theory running around,” she wrote, “conservative groups have now taken to spamming us by filing bogus ethics complaints so that Fox News can report on ‘alleged,’ untrue scandals.”

She added, “This is how the misinformation machine works, folks.”

Ms Ocasio-Cortez posted a link to an NBC News fact-check, which directly refuted the notion her campaign had violated any laws.

Her campaign attorney said in a statement to reporters on Wednesday that groups affiliated with the campaign “have at all times been fully in compliance with federal campaign finance laws.”

The report she linked to noted the complexities surrounding some aspects of her campaign and its vendors system, but campaign finance experts told the outlet there appeared to be no evidence of wrongdoing.

The conservative groups has accused Ms Ocasio-Cortez of an “extensive off-the-books operation to make hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenditures in support of multiple candidates for federal office”.

The Democrat and her team “were aware, or should have been aware, of the sweeping and apparently illegal nature of the enterprise,” the group claimed.

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The NBC News report goes on to break down the misleading controversy, concluding, “There's no evidence of self-dealing or any kind of elaborate scam, two experts told NBC News, which is often the major concern with LLCs and PACs run by the same people.”

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