Beto O’Rourke (shown), the Democratic presidential candidate whose claim to fame is losing a Senate race, has a habit of playing fast and loose with campaign funds.
The Daily Caller revealed that O’Rourke paid a boatload of campaign money through the years to himself or his wife.
It’s not a against the law, but campaign finance experts frown upon it as a form of “self-dealing,” The DC reported.
And it’s not the first of O’Rourke’s campaign monkeyshines.
Six Figures
O’Rourke, The DC reported, “paid roughly $110,000 in campaign funds to a web development company while either he or his wife owned it, public records show.”
The breakdown?
Beto for Texas paid Stanton Street Technology Group $58,544 during the 2011-12 election cycle, $39,060 during the 2013-14 cycle, $9,290 in the 2015-16 cycle and $32,778 during the 2017-18 cycle, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Either O’Rourke or his wife owned Stanton Street — a small web development firm that O’Rourke founded in 1998 — during the vast majority of those payments. Such payments are legal, so long as the campaign is charged for the actual cost of the services, but ethics watchdogs have criticized the practice as a form of self-dealing.
When O’Rourke landed in Congress in 2013, his wife, Amy took over the company until she sold it in March 2017, The DC reported, citing O’Rourke’s 2017 year-end financial disclosure. “He listed the sale value in the $100,001 to $1 million range.”
After the sale, announced in June, 2017, the new CEO said Amy O’Rourke would remain active in the company, The DC reported.
Beyond that, O’Rourke “doubled as both candidate and treasurer during his first congressional campaign in 2011 and 2012, according to FEC records.” The campaign “paid the candidate’s own business for services including ‘consulting’ and ‘social media’ during that time, FEC records show.”
Stanton Street must not have been much of a success among candidates for federal office, however, The DC reported. “The only other federal candidate to report payments to Stanton Street was Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar in 2018 as she ran to replace Beto O’Rourke in Texas’s 16th Congressional District, FEC records show.”
As well, The DC reported, O’Rourke bought Twitter stock before it was available to the public, a move that “ethics watchdogs said was a violation of House rules.”
“Native Spanish Speaker” Helped Illegals
O’Rourke campaign-finance shenanigans with his own company are unsurprising. Although the payments to his own company aren’t illegal but instead, again, a form of shady self-dealing, O’Rourke likely wouldn’t care if he did break the law.
Project Veritas recorded staffers on his failed Senate campaign admitting they aided the dispersal of illegal aliens into the country, an unsurprising move among the social justice warriors given that the candidate advocates open borders.
As well, O’Rourke has a criminal past. In 1998, cops nailed him for drunk driving; in 1995, they collared him on burglary charges, but O’Rourke slipped free and wasn’t prosecuted in either case. He has also fantasized online about murdering children.
When O’Rourke name surfaced as a potential candidate, Democrats were ecstatic, hoping “Beto” would be the next Obama, which on some level, he would be. He’s an inexperienced far-out leftist with virtually no political or professional accomplishments who parlayed a defeat in a Senate race into a serious campaign for president. But somehow, the inexperienced loser raised $9.4 million in the first 18 days of his campaign, or $500,000 a day the Texas Tribune observed.
Gullible Supporters
A recent event illustrates just how gullible leftists, including O’Rourke’s media sympathizers, can be.
Last weekend, reporting from an O’Rourke rally, The Associated Press observed that “O’Rourke also spoke at length in his native Spanish, eliciting loud and sustained cheers.”
Hilarity ensued, and AP corrected the egregious error. Tweeted one wag, “Ah, yes, the 4th generation Irish American from Texas, Robert Francis O’Rourke, speaking his ‘native Spanish.’ So good, in fact, was his ‘native Spanish’ that the crowds actually thought they’d been magically whisked away to the Emerald Isle with the other native Spanish speakers.”
But the AP reporter’s mistake is neither unique nor unusual. It is instead illustrative of the gullible who believed O’Rourke’s nickname, “Beto,” signifies Hispanic ancestry, that ethnicity being a putative plus in politics these days.
Photo of Beto O’Rourke: AP Images
