Lauren Boebert Probed By FEC Over Shady Venmo Payments

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“Federal officials are pressing Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., for answers on the apparent personal use of thousands of dollars in campaign funds,” CNBC reports, adding yet another item to the growing list of concerns surrounding the Congresswoman. The Boebert team claims that the charges to the campaign were a mistake and have already been reimbursed, but the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is requesting more information on the matter. The charges — which totaled over $6,000 — originally went through Venmo, and on disclosure forms filed with federal authorities, the Boebert team characterized the money as covering “personal expense[s] of Lauren Boebert billed to [the] campaign account in error.”

A letter from the FEC to Boebert’s team notes that “if it is determined that the disbursement(s) constitutes the personal use of campaign funds, the Commission may consider taking further legal action.” Ben Stout, who serves as Boebert’s deputy chief of staff and communications director, reiterated to CNBC that the charges had already been reimbursed. (Such is also noted in the federal filings.) As Stout put it: “The Venmo charges were personal expenses that were billed to the campaign account in error. The reimbursement has already happened and will appear in the Q3 filing.” It’s not immediately clear what the charges were for and how exactly the allegedly accidental charges to the Boebert campaign account went through. The original charges stretched across May and June, so the issue wasn’t a one-time thing. The charges consisted of two $2,000 expenses and two $1,325 expenses, with one from each category occurring on both May 3 and June 3 of this year.

This issue is not the only similar problem that Boebert is facing. Earlier this year, a watchdog group called the Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against the incendiary Congresswoman over a large reimbursement from her campaign for supposed mileage expenses. Late last year, Boebert received a mileage reimbursement from her campaign for $21,199.52 — and as HuffPost explains, “At the federal reimbursement rate of 57.5 cents per mile, Boebert would have had to drive 36,868 miles in seven months to justify the amount.” Obviously, driving that much in that period of time isn’t exactly feasible. That distance is approximately one and a half times the circumference of the entire earth, as HuffPost also observes.

Underlying these issues, Boebert has conducted herself in office with noticeable incompetence. Recently, she even “joked” on Twitter about the Taliban, writing that the Afghan terror group, which recently took over Afghanistan, was the one “building back better,” in mocking reference to the Biden slogan to “Build Back Better.”