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While legal experts say there's no evidence that the team committed serious campaign finance violations, some say there may be cause for further investigation.
Bradley Smith, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said the biggest issue is that the PACs and the LLC didn't adequately disclose what they spent money on.
Smith argued there's a possibility that the LLC sold its services to Ocasio-Cortez's campaign at below-market rates and was then reimbursed by the PACs. And this, he said, would amount to an independent expenditure on behalf of the campaign, or an in-kind contribution, that exceeded legal limits.
"Somehow they've got to account for that," Smith told INSIDER. "It looks like large contributions in excess of the legal limits to the Ocasio-Cortez campaign and other campaigns."
But other experts, including Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center, say the allegations are "speculative" and that there's no evidence that the PACs improperly subsidized work for the campaign.
He and other election law experts say the lack of disclosure by Ocasio-Cortez's team is the fault of relatively lax laws governing reporting on payments to so-called sub-vendors.
Because the FEC doesn't require it, the LLC didn't have to list how it used the money paid to it by the PACs.
"More transparency when a campaign pays a consulting firm for work would be a great thing," Paul Ryan, a campaign finance expert at the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, told INSIDER. But he added, "We don't have that information, as the public, because the law doesn't require it. It's not the case that we lack that information because these particular political players failed to comply with disclosure requirements."
Mitrani wrote in his statement, "if the PACs and campaigns were required to provide additional information on sub-vendor payments made by Brand New Congress LLC, it would have done so."
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5 years ago
What does need to be disclosed is what PACs and campaigns hire vendors for — labeling what specific work the LLC was paif for as a vendor for the two PACs and Ocasio-Cortez's campaign.
Fischer and Ryan say that if Ocasio-Cortez and her team did, in fact, mislabel payments (that were not "strategic consulting"), the FEC would consider that to be a minor violation that could result in a fine — not jail time.
"There are phrases on the FEC's approved list of phrases that should be used to describe fundraising activities and phone-banking activities. 'Strategic consulting' is not some magic phrase that covers everything," Ryan said. "But in the grand scheme of things, the FEC would consider such an inaccurate description of the purpose of a disbursement as a very minor violation."
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