Ocasio-Cortez says she was not invited to Bernie Sanders’ kickoff rally

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said in a weekend interview that she did not attend the kickoff rally for Bernie Sanders' second presidential campaign.
The freshman lawmaker sat down with NY1’s Errol Louis, host of “Inside City Hall,” for a Sunday interview that aired Tuesday night.
When asked whether she attended Sanders’ rally in Brooklyn on Saturday, she said: “I did not. Yesterday was my day to take care of myself.”
“I assume he asked you to be there,” Louis responded.
“Um, he, he didn’t, actually,” Ocasio-Cortez responded. “I think that, we’ve been, uh, so we’ve been in active conversation, I’ve been speaking with him and several other of the 2020 (presidential) candidates.”
She went on to say that endorsing a candidate “very early in this race” prevents the Democratic Party from having conversations on issues like income inequality, criminal justice, immigration, and the environment.
She later conceded that she will eventually endorse a candidate before the New York Democratic primary.
The interview comes amid a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission this week that Ocasio-Cortez violated campaign finance law by being part of an "off-the-books operation" to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on candidates last year. She denied the allegations on Tuesday.
Fox News' Alex Pappas contributed to this report.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t trying to ‘close the door’ on 2020 when she said she was not running: report

What a difference a day makes.
Hillary Clinton made headlines Monday when she told a local New York news channel that she would not run for president in 2020.
"I'm not running, but I'm going to keep on working and speaking and standing up for what I believe," the former presidential nominee told News 12 Westchester. She insisted that she would remain relevant and has no plans of "going anywhere."
But late Tuesday, Maggie Haberman, a political reporter for the New York Times, tweeted that she spoke with a person close to the former secretary of state. The unnamed source said Clinton was not trying to "be emphatic and close the door on running" with the comment and was apparently "surprised" at the reaction.
"The person also says [Clinton] is extremely unlikely to run, but that she remains bothered that she's expected to close the door on it when, say, John Kerry isn't. She has told her team she is waiting at least to see the Mueller report," Haberman tweeted.
There is little buzz about a potential Kerry announcement, but there is clear interest in a potential Joe Biden bid. Recent polls have him leading the field of Democrats who have already announced. With Michael Bloomberg out of the way, there seems to be a clear path for a more centrist Democrat.
Those interested in Biden's decision include New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who are reportedly in "wait-and-see" mode on their own potential candidacies until Biden ends his "Hamlet act," according to Politico.
Clinton told News 12 Westchester on Monday that there is a lot at stake for the country.
"We've just gotten so polarized,” she said.  “We've gotten into really opposing camps unlike anything I've ever seen in my adult life."
President Trump said earlier that Clinton would “be sorely missed” in 2020. Clinton appeared to respond to Trump's comment with a gif from "Mean Girls," asking, "Why are you so obsessed with me?"

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Nadler launches expansive Trump probe says, 'we have to make sure this is not a dictatorship'

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said on Monday that the House Democrats latest probe into the Trump administration is necessary to make sure it “is not a dictatorship.” (CNN)

Within hours of House Democrats launching a sweeping probe into President Trump’s affairs on Monday, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said the investigation was necessary to make sure the Trump administration is not a dictatorship.
Nadler made the comments during a Monday appearance on CNN’s "Erin Burnett OutFront."
When asked whether Democrats were just trying to kill Trump’s presidency “by a thousand cuts,” Nadler insisted: “We’re simply exercising our oversight jurisdiction and (Trump) doesn’t understand or he’s not willing to concede to Congress that we have an oversight jurisdiction.”
“[Y]ou’ve had two years of sustained attacks by an administration of the nature that we haven’t seen probably in a century or more, against the free press, against the courts, against law enforcement administrations...against freedom of speech,” Nadler added.
HOUSE DEMS LAUNCH EXPANSIVE TRUMP PROBE WITH SLEW OF DOCUMENT REQUESTS
After opening a new avenue in their investigations into Trump on Monday, Nadler said the Judiciary Committee served document requests to 81 agencies, entities and individuals, as part of a new probe into "alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption, and other abuses of power by President Trump."
“We have to make sure, as to what is true and what is not true,” Nadler said. “And maybe come up with legislative limits on power or maybe do other things. But we have to make sure that this is not a dictatorship and that the rule of law is respected.”
Fox News' Alex Pappas and Gregg Re contributed to this report.

Democratic derby: Hickenlooper, Inslee and…Andrew Cuomo?

The Democratic stampede is under way, with candidates charging in who have little national name recognition.
The latest two entrants are governors with solid records, but no record of exciting anyone. They are basically running as competent managers, which may be admirable, but is also a tough sell in a polarized environment where all the Democratic energy seems to be on the left.
John Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor, and Jay Inslee, the current Washington governor, probably figure they have as good a shot as anyone else—and that the national attention couldn’t hurt, even if they flame out.
And then there’s Andrew Cuomo, who’s making the case for a nominee very much like him—but only dropping the barest hints that he might run.
CUOMO APPEALS TO BEZOS TO BRING AMAZON BACK TO NYC: REPORT
The New York Times says Hickenlooper is a “socially progressive, pro-business Democrat who has called himself an ‘extreme moderate.’”
Even a friend of Hickenlooper is quoted as saying: “There are very few people I know who wake up and want to go caucus to support a raging moderate.”
And his spokeswoman “compared a potential Hickenlooper-Trump election to ‘a “Revenge of the Nerds”-type situation.’”
Running as a nerd doesn’t strike me as a winning formula in the Trump era.
Liberal Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman says that “in a different year he might have been a strong contender” as a “reasonably successful and well-liked governor, middle-aged white guy.” But he argues that it’s as though Hickenlooper “parachuted in from a few decades ago and has no idea how politics works in 2019 or what sorts of impediments the next Democratic president is going to face”—namely, fierce Republican opposition.
Inslee, a former congressman, is running with climate change as his overriding priority, trying to separate himself from the rest of the field. But as the Post noted, “despite his calls for drastic action to combat climate change, Inslee’s most ambitious climate initiative — the institution of a tax on carbon emissions — was voted down in the state’s November elections amid massive opposition spending from oil companies.”
A Seattle Times story observes that “it remains to seen whether Inslee can stand out even on his signature issue, given that other Democratic candidates have expressed support, at least in principle, for a shift to a clean energy economy dubbed the Green New Deal.”
The Cuomo chatter is fueled by an Atlantic piece that featured several hours of interviews with the third-term New York governor.
Cuomo keeps dodging the question of whether he’d like to be president, and then says Joe Biden is running anyway. And if Biden doesn’t run? “Call me back,” says Cuomo.
On paper, Cuomo would be a strong candidate, having accomplished such liberal goals as same-sex marriage and gun control in one of the biggest blue states. But at home he’s often criticized for not being liberal enough.
“Cuomo made it clear that he thinks most of the Democrats running for president are going off a cliff, feeling out how far left they can go while still saying Sanders is too far left.”
In other words, he’s kinda sorta making the case for himself without doing so.
I covered his father, Mario Cuomo, who was also a third-term governor in 1991 when he left a plane on a runway rather than fly to New Hampshire on the last day of the filing deadline to challenge Bill Clinton and others.
My sense is that the current governor shares that aversion to a White House bid, or he would have done more to lay the groundwork before now.
The governors provide a fascinating counterpoint to all the Democratic senators already in the campaign. There was a time when the country liked elevating governors to the White House: Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush.
But that was before Donald Trump transformed the political landscape.

Ocasio-Cortez's mom left New York City over to property taxes: report

Bianca Ocasio-Cortez and US House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

The mother of soak-the-rich congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that she was forced to flee the Big Apple and move to Florida because the property taxes were so high.
“I was paying $10,000 a year in real estate taxes up north. I’m paying $600 a year in Florida. It’s stress-free down here,” Blanca Ocasio-Cortez told the Daily Mail from her home in Eustis, a town of less than 20,000 in central Florida north of Orlando.
The mother-of-two — who calls herself BOC — said she picked Eustis because a relative already lived there and right before Christmas 2016 she paid $87,000 for an 860-square-foot home on a quiet street that dead-ends at a cemetery.
Her daughter raised eyebrows with her pitch to raise the top marginal tax rate on income earned above $10 million to 70 percent.
She has also gotten behind the so-called Green New Deal, that would see a massive and costly government effort to address climate change the way Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal to rescue the US economy during the Depression.
This story was originally published by the New York Post.

Ocasio-Cortez, chief of staff illegally moved $885K in campaign contributions 'off the books,' FEC complaint alleges

I'm Baaack.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive firebrand's multimillionaire chief of staff, apparently violated campaign finance law by funneling nearly $1 million in contributions from political action committees Chakrabarti established to private companies that he also controlled, according to an explosive complaint filed Monday with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and obtained by Fox News.
Amid the allegations, a former FEC commissioner late Monday suggested in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation that Ocasio-Cortez and her team could be facing major fines and potentially even jail time if they were knowingly and willfully violating the law by hiding their control of the Justice Democrats political action committee (PAC). Such an arrangement could have allowed Ocasio-Cortez's campaign to receive donations in excess of the normal limit, by pooling contributions to both the PAC and the campaign itself.
The FEC complaint asserts that Chakrabarti established two PACs, the Brand New Congress PAC and Justice Democrats PAC, and then systematically transfered more than $885,000 in contributions received by those PACs to the Brand New Campaign LLC and the Brand New Congress LLC -- companies that, unlike PACs, are exempt from reporting all of their significant expenditures. The PACs claimed the payments were for "strategic consulting."
Although large financial transfers from PACs to LLCs are not necessarily improper, the complaint argues that the goal of the "extensive" scheme was seemingly to illegally dodge detailed legal reporting requirements of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which are designed to track campaign expenditures.
"It appears 'strategic consulting' was a mischaracterization of a wide range of activities that should have been reported individually," the complaint states.

FILE - In this Wednesday June 27, 2018, file photo, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, left, the winner of New York's Democratic Congressional primary, greets supporters following her victory, along with Saikat Chakrabarti, founder of Justice Democrats and senior adviser for her campaign. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

The complaint was drafted by the conservative, Virginia-based National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC). Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti, according to the NLPC's complaint, appeared to have "orchestrated an extensive off-the-books operation to make hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenditures in support of multiple candidates for federal office."
The funds, the NLPC writes, were likely spent on campaign events for Ocasio-Cortez and other far-left Democratic candidates favored by Chakrabarti, who made his fortune in Silicon Valley and previously worked on Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. But no precise accounting for the expenses is available, and the complaint asks the FEC to conduct an investigation into the matter immediately.
"These are not minor or technical violations," Tom Anderson, director of NLPC’s Government Integrity Project, said in a statement. "We are talking about real money here. In all my years of studying FEC reports, I’ve never seen a more ambitious operation to circumvent reporting requirements. Representative Ocasio-Cortez has been quite vocal in condemning so-called dark money, but her own campaign went to great lengths to avoid the sunlight of disclosure.”
Added Anderson: “They believe their cause is so great that they don’t have to play by the rules. They believe that they are above campaign finance law."
Brand New Congress LLC does not appear to be registered as an LLC in any state, according to the complaint, but is a registered 527 tax-exempt organization. Fox News confirmed that Brand New Campaign LLC is a registered Delaware corporation, but Brand New Congress LLC is not.
Ocasio-Cortez's office did not return a request for comment.
In announcing the complaint the NLPC pointed to a 2016 interview on MSNBC, in which the 33-year-old Chakrabarti told anchor Rachel Maddow that he wanted to employ a "single, unified presidential-style campaign" model to "galvanize" voters nationally to elect progressives to Congress, while helping candidates avoid the stress of fundraising and managing their own campaigns.
Other legal experts also sounded the alarm on Monday, saying Chakrabarti's unusual arrangement raised serious unanswered questions.
Former FEC Associate General Counsel for Policy Adav Noti, who currently directs the Campaign Legal Center, told Fox News that it was a "total mystery" to him why Chakrabarti had established an LLC seemingly to take money from the PAC, rather than simply create a "normal venture," like a consulting business, to provide services for candidates on the books.
"Certainly, it's not permissible to use an LLC or any other kind of intermediary to conceal the recipient or purpose of a PAC's spending," Noti said. "The law requires the PAC to report who it disperses money to. You can't try to evade that by routing it through an LLC or corporation or anyone else."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., listens to questioning of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, at the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Noti added: "What's so weird about this situation is that the PAC that dispersed so much of its money to one entity that was so clearly affiliated with the PAC. Usually, that's a sign that it's what's come to be known as a 'scam PAC' -- one that's operated for the finanical benefit of its operators, rather than one designed to engage in political activity."
At the same time, Noti said, Chakrabarti had provided "long descriptions of why they structured it the way they did -- which is not something a scam PAC would do," because it only draws attention to the unusual setup. And Noti cautioned that there is a tendency for some groups to try to gain attention by invoking Ocasio-Cortez.
"But on the other hand," Noti added, Ocasio-Cortez's "explanations don't make a lot of sense on their face. I read their explanation multiple times, and I still don't understand. If you want to start a business to provide services to campaigns -- many of those are organized as LLC's, and you sell your services."

"I read their explanation multiple times, and I still don't understand."
— Former FEC Associate General Counsel Adav Noti

Instead, Chaktrabarti "started a PAC, which has legal obligations to report all of is incoming and outgoing money, and then used the PAC to disperse its funds to the LLC," Noti said.
Added former FEC chairman Bradley A. Smith, in an interview with The Washington Examiner: "It's a really weird situation. I see almost no way that you can do that without it being at least a reporting violation, quite likely a violation of the contribution limits. You might say from a campaign finance angle that the LLC was essentially operating as an unregistered committee."
Last week, Anderson also raised concerns over Ocasio-Cortez's decision to announce, with much fanfare, that she would offer a minimum salary of $52,000 to her staffers, and a maximum salary of $80,000 -- far below the typical six-figure highs hit by chiefs of staff and other high-level congressional workers.
Government watchdogs pointed out that federal law requires congressional workers making more than $126,000 a year -- which would ordinarily include Chakrabarti -- to file detailed forms outlining all of their outside income, including investments and gifts.
“Purposefully underpaying staffers in order to avoid transparency is an old trick some of the most corrupt members of Congress have used time and again,” Anderson said.
Speaking to the New York Post, Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent dismissed the FEC complaint, saying the campaign had consulted an elections lawyer and that all money was properly accounted for.
“It was payment for services. ... We believe that complaint is politically motivated, basically intended to create a political story,” Trent told the Post.
Noti told Fox News that Trent's explanation could be plausible -- and if so, it might help Ocasio-Cortez's team avoid civil fraud lawsuits.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during a march organised by the Women's March Alliance in the Manhattan borough of New York City, U.S., January 19, 2019. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs - RC1647E36CA0

"One possibility -- a strong possibility, based on the description they put out, is they just got really bad legal advice that somehow said they had to to do this," Noti said. "But regardless, when they decided to use the PAC form, which they did, they subjected themselves to all the legal requirements that come with that."
Election laws are complicated, Noti added, and there have been some erroneous recent reports related to Ocasio-Cortez's campaign. For example, FEC filings reviewed by Fox News show that Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign paid the Justice Democrats PAC more than $35,000 from 2017 to 2018 for "web services," “strategic consulting,” and "campaign services."
While some outlets have incorrectly reported that federal rules generally prohibit PACs from providing more than $5,000 in services to campaigns, Noti told Fox News that the payments were likely proper so long as they were for the fair market value of the services rendered.
In terms of possible penalties, Noti said that Ocasio-Cortez's campaign could be facing FEC fines if it followed bad legal advice and made reporting errors. But civil or even criminal fraud statutes, as opposed to campaign finance laws, would potentially kick in if it were determined that Chakrabarti had intentionally tried to hide the money to use for illicit expenses.
Meanwhile, former FEC commissioner Brad Smith told the Daily Caller News Foundation's investigative unit that, because Ocasio-Cortez may have held legal control of the Justice Democrats PAC while the PAC was supporting her campaign, the two committees were likely acting as affiliated committees -- and therefore share an individual contribution limit of $2,700 that might have been improperly and repeatedly exceeded.
The Daily Caller News Foundation's review of archived copies of the Justice Democrats PAC's website and relevant campaign documents indicated that Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti "obtained majority control of Justice Democrats PAC in December 2017" -- and yet allegedly failed to disclose afterwards to the FEC the fact that the PAC was supporting her candidacy.
“If this were determined to be knowing and willful, they could be facing jail time," Smith said. "Even if it’s not knowing and willful, it would be a clear civil violation of the act, which would require disgorgement of the contributions and civil penalties. I think they’ve got some real issues here.”
Added former Republican FEC commissioner Hans von Spakovsky: “If the facts as alleged are true, and a candidate had control over a PAC that was working to get that candidate elected, then that candidate is potentially in very big trouble and may have engaged in multiple violations of federal campaign finance law, including receiving excessive contributions."
Monday's FEC complaint comes on the heels of a separate complaint by the Washington, D.C.-based Coolidge Reagan Foundation, which alleged last week that the Brand New Congress PAC may have illegally funneled thousands of dollars to Ocasio-Cortez's live-in boyfriend, Riley Roberts.
It was first reported late last month that the Brand New Congress PAC paid Roberts during the early days of the Ocasio-Cortez campaign. According to FEC records, the PAC made two payments to Roberts – one in August 2017 and one in September 2017 – both for $3,000.
The FEC complaint specifically cites the use of "intermediaries" to make the payments, "the vague and amorphous nature of the services Riley ostensibly provided," the relatively small amount of money raised by the campaign at that stage and "the romantic relationship between Ocasio-Cortez and Riley" in asserting the transactions might violate campaign finance law.
The Coolidge Reagan Foundation -- a 501(c)(3) -- is requesting that the FEC look into the payments for potential violations on relevant campaign finance laws that state that campaign contributions “shall not be converted by any person to personal use” and that “an authorized committee must report the name and address of each person who has received any disbursement not disclosed.”
Fox News' Perry Chiaramonte contributed to this report.

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