Bernie Sanders has long masqueraded as a purist when it comes to campaign finance, publicly eschewing Super PACs and dark money. In reality — and like any commie — he is only opposed to other people paying for campaigns that way.
Sanders’ nonprofit Our Revolution is the candidate’s conscience-easing workaround for his phony principles, and now a complaint has been filed with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the group has committed campaign finance violations.
A watchdog group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Wednesday accusing a political nonprofit established by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) of accepting contributions in excess of federal limits while supporting the Vermont senator’s presidential bid.
The complaint, filed by Common Cause, alleges that the group Our Revolution has accepted donations in excess of the $5,000-per-individual federal limit for political action committees, while spending money in support of Sanders’s presidential campaign, including voter mobilization efforts in Iowa.
Predictably, an Our Revolution spokesperson made a foot-stomping denial of any wrongdoing, pretending that it wasn’t that closely connected to Sanders.
About that:
While Sanders has not held a formal role in the group since 2016, it has numerous ties to his political orbit.
Our Revolution’s founding board members included the senator’s wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders; his former campaign spokesperson Michael Briggs; his former chief of staff Huck Gutman; a former political adviser to his presidential campaign, Richard Sugarman; and Brad Deutsch, who served as legal counsel to Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Jeff Weaver, a longtime adviser to Sanders who now works on the senator’s presidential campaign, served as Our Revolution’s first president. He was later succeeded by Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who stepped down from her role with the group last year to serve as a co-chair of Sanders’s campaign.
The kicker here is that Sanders is washing his hands to absolve himself from any blame by claiming that campaign finance laws prevent him from contacting Our Revolution to tell them to stop doing whatever it is they may be doing that’s wrong.
He doesn’t disavow the group, he merely hides behind a “my hands are tied” shrug.
Bernie does do well with small donors, that’s true. The “five dollars at a time” crowd may not be enough to get him across the finish line, however. Should the Democrats completely lose their minds and nominate him, small donors will look even smaller when he comes up against President Trump’s general election war chest.
He may become even less devoted to his fake principles then.
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PJ Media Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.”
