Payments to corporation owned by Ocasio-Cortez aide come under scrutiny

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)’s chief of staff helped establish two political action committees that paid a corporation he ran more than $1 million in 2016 and 2017, federal campaign finance records show.

Brand New Congress LLC, the corporation owned by Saikat Chakrabarti, was also paid $18,880 for strategic consulting by Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign in 2017, records show. The following year, he worked as a volunteer to manage her campaign, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The arrangement, first reported by conservative outlets, left hidden who ultimately profited from the payments — a sharp juxtaposition with Ocasio-Cortez’s calls for transparency in politics. She has called dark money “the enemy to democracy.”

The money that flowed to her chief of staff’s corporation have subjected the first-term congresswoman to critics’ charges of hypocrisy. On Monday, a conservative group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the PACs failed to properly disclose their spending.

David Mitrani, attorney for the PACs, the LLC and Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, said in a statement Tuesday that all four entities “fully complied with the law and the highest ethical standards.”

He said that Chakrabarti never received any salary or profit from the corporation, the PACs or the campaign.

“There is no violation” of campaign finance law, Ocasio-Cortez told Fox News on Tuesday. It is unclear whether she had knowledge of the payments to Chakrabarti’s corporation.

Limited-liability corporations, which in some states are not required to disclose details about their owners or spending, have played an increasing role in politics in recent years. Critics say such entities allow both donors and vendors to mask their activities, making it difficult for the public to trace who is giving to campaigns and profiting from them.