Apparently three out of four members of the "Squad" are now facing serious allegations of campaign finance violations and abuse. According to Wikipedia: “the Squad is a group of four congresswomen elected in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections, made up of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. All are women of color under 50.” Apparently besides their hatred of President Trump, they also share an alleged disregard for campaign finance law. First on AOC, arguably the most famous of the three:
Ocasio-Cortez’s political rise in 2018 was made possible in large part to Justice Democrats PAC, an outside political action committee that recruited her to enter politics in 2017 and provided much of her campaign’s staffing and overhead needs in the lead-up to her June 2018 primary victory over former Rep. Joe Crowley. . . .
Ocasio-Cortez and her former campaign chair Saikat Chakrabarti were appointed to hold two of the PAC’s three board seats in December 2017, but the Federal Election Commission was never notified of the affiliation between her campaign and Justice Democrats.
While Ocasio-Cortez’s alleged connections are troubling, the allegations against Rep. Taliab, if true, seem to be a textbook violation of campaign finance law.
“It’s pretty simple,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., tweeted last March, in calling for President Trump’s impeachment. “No one is above the law, including the President of the United States.”
But perhaps Tlaib – among Trump’s harshest critics in Congress – needs to follow up with another tweet, in the interests of transparency. This tweet could read: “No one is above the law. Except me.”
According to a report issued last week by the House Ethics Committee, there is “substantial reason to believe” that Tlaib used campaign funds for personal expenditures, thereby violating both campaign finance laws and House ethics rules. . . .
Text messages and emails between Tlaib and her campaign staff show that throughout her campaign she repeatedly asked her campaign for money to cover personal expenses like “car maintenance, child care and other necessities.”
Federal campaign finance law prohibits the use of funds for paying personal expenses.
Omar has already been punished for her violations of Minnesota campaign fiance law but may be in more trouble for a violation similar to Talib’s:
Minnesota’s Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board ordered Omar in June to repay her state campaign $3,500 it had improperly spent for non-campaign purposes in 2016 and 2017 during her tenure as a state legislator. Omar was also required to pay a $500 civil penalty for using campaign funds to travel to a non-campaign related conference in Florida.
This has come up again in regard to payments to an alleged lover at the federal level:
Anderson, of the National Legal and Policy Center, told the DCNF: “We believe Representative Ilhan Omar may have touched the third rail of campaign finance law: disbursing campaign funds for personal use. It’s a brazen act Representative Omar was caught doing before in Minnesota and all of the evidence we’ve seen tells us she’s probably doing it again.”
If the media were fair, they would ask questions of these three squad members and take their ethics complaints against others with a grain of salt.