AOC Disguises ‘Fun Run’ for ‘Green New Deal’ As Campaign Fundraising Event, Tricking Participants

A freshman Congresswoman from New York is facing scrutiny after hosting a “Fun Run” after some participants were unaware that their donations were actually campaign contributions.

“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a 5k in Queens Saturday that she billed as ‘a Family Fun Run supporting U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal on the Saturday following Earth Day,'” according to The New York Post. 

Many of the 400 participants, the report said, did not know that the $30 registration fee for the run was actually a donation to the Congresswoman’s campaign fund.

From The Post: 

A vaguely worded notices on AOC’s Facebook page — saying that the run would support “U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & the Green New Deal” — worsened the confusion.

But the fine print on a third event-related website revealed the truth.

“Registration fees are contributions to AOC for Congress,” reads the legal disclosure on aoc5k.com, which lists the Federal Election Commission rules that donors must follow.

Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman, Corbin Trent, confirmed that the run was a fundraising event.

At least one participant voiced his concern over the lack of transparency from the Congresswoman’s office.

“The site says it’s to benefit her environmental plan,” one participant reportedly said. “If it is going to go directly to her campaign they should have said so.”

Furthermore, some parents registered their children, thus contributing to the Congresswoman’s campaign under their children’s names – a potential violation of campaign finance law.

The young House Rep has had some serious run-ins with campaign finance rules already in her short tenure in Congress. She was accused of paying her boyfriend Riley Roberts out of her campaign coffers, and a March Federal Elections Commission complaint alleges that her campaign moved nearly $1 million “off the books.”


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