Rep. Lauren Boebert Paid Rent, Utilities with Campaign Funds

“Of the nearly 200 different countries on the face of the earth, precisely one of them has an elected leader who publicly identifies as a western-style conservative.
His name is Victor Orban, he’s the prime minister of Hungary.
What does Victor Orban believe?
Just a few years ago his views would have seemed moderate and conventional.
He thinks families are more important than banks.
He believes countries need borders.
For saying these things out loud, Orban has been vilified.”Ooh they’re ‘so mad’ at Victor Orban.
Last month, Tucker Carlson Fox News host and, uh, heir to a frozen dinner company fortune, took a fieldtrip to, of all places, Hungary.
He spent the week there broadcasting from the capital city of Budapest and, like you just saw, lavishing praise on the country’s Prime Minister, a man named Victor Orban.
Orban has been in power for over a decade. He has positioned himself as a right-wing populist.
He loves families, not banks. A man of the people, railing against those liberal elites and the media and the greedy bankers.
He’s bragged about building a quote “illiberal state” and widely seen as a well-aspiring dictator and a strong man.
It’s rhetoric that sounds all too familiar, but the thing is, Orban is not really a man of the people.
Hate to break it to you, over the last decade, he has consolidated power and, guess what?, wealth for himself and his allies throughout his rule.
Check this out: in July, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament tweeted these photos from a Hungarian news site saying, quote, “Victor Orban has been lying about the massive construction project claimed to be his father’s agribusiness with almost no assets on paper.”
He’s building a private mansion on a former estate. A feudal lord in the making.
Orban is not publicizing this estate, there’s very little publicly available about it.
Another publication wrote late last year, quote, “Among other things, a huge underground garage and a 500-square-meter residential building is being built.”
Ah, yes. Victor Orban, the guy whose entire brand is about right-wing populism being for the working class families not banks, building a Versailles-style mansion.
But that’s a story as old as time, the populist who channels the will of the people against the evil elites also stuffing his own pockets.
One of the oldest grifts in the universe, the populist who uses populism as a cover for corruption.
Certainly something we are familiar with here in the U.S.
Take Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado. She owns a restaurant called Shooter’s Grill where employees are encouraged to carry firearms.
She was just elected to congress in 2020 running on an anti-COVID restrictions platform.
Now we have learned that Boebert paid rent and utility bills for her restaurant with campaign funds, which is very much in violation of federal campaign finance laws.
The new filings of the Federal Election Commission show, and this is not the first time, Boebert has misused campaign funds.
In February, the Denver Post reported Boebert paid herself more than $22,000 dollars in mileage reimbursements from her campaign account last year to justify those reimbursements, Boebert would have had to drive, get this,
38,712 miles while campaigning, despite having no publicly advertised campaign events in March, April, July, and only one in May.
Uh, just for context, the equatorial circumference of the Earth is not quite 25,000 miles. So that’s quite a congressional campaign she was running!
We have seen this behavior with wildly, fragrantly corrupt politicians who champion the working class and then misuse the resources of their supporters for their own personal gain.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history, New York University author of Strong Men – From Mussolini to the Present.
Ian Silverii is a columnist at the Denver Post following the January 6 Insurrection, he published a piece titled, “Lauren Boebert should Resign or Be Expelled,” and they both join me now.
Ian, let’s start on the billboard story because, you know, the mileage stuff I’ve reported around, you know, these FEC filings enough to know that that is an absolute, like, alarm bell going off in an FEC filing.
But you do it once, now we’ve got twice, and it appears that they’re just recording this in their public disclosures that they’re using campaign money this way.
Yeah, they do it, like, quite a bit after those reports are due too, so it’s pretty weird. They don’t actually file when they’re supposed to and then, several months later, they file some kind of weird amended report.
It’s not just the mileage reimbursements, I mean, that’s one-and-a-half times the circumference of the Earth in case you’re trying to do the math at home, $20,000.
Weirdly enough, it was the same amount of money that her failing restaurant Shooter’s Grill owed Garfield County for non-payment of unemployment premiums around the same time.
So she gets $20k from her campaign and then pays off a $20,000 lien that was on a restaurant. So it’s really no surprise that all of a sudden she’s using her campaign funds to pay her rent now.
It’s really important to remember…
Wait, wait, wait, wait, slow down. I wanna, I just wanna make sure that I understand this. This is all publicly available and established.
There was a lien and a debt that she owed the county because she hadn’t paid taxes on unemployment insurance.
That is correct, yeah. About $19,000 dollars in the county and then $20,000 dollars from her campaign and it’s around the same time.
It’s really audacious, yeah! And this is the thing: Donald Trump committed crimes in broad daylight all the time. He has yet to be held accountable.
He’s her hero, she probably figures she can do the same thing and, so far, despite the fact there’s investigations and complaints being filed, she’s getting away with it.
Yeah, that’s, I mean, that is sort of the theme here, Ruth, and it’s interesting to me that actually Orban has been secretive about this because it’s a little different.
It’s sort of a little less flagrant although there’s a lot of stories that come out of Hungary about people that are connected to Orban.
In the same way that people connected to Mubarak, in Egypt, for instance, used to find themselves with massively lucrative car dealerships and all sorts of businesses.
But this has always been a central part of the kind of authoritarian two-step. Particularly when they sort of championed the vote.
Oh totally, and I added the chapter on corruption to my book Strongmen because it’s central to the whole authoritarian playbook.
And one of the biggest scams of populism from, you know, for 100 years is this idea that they were going to drain the swamp, that they are pure individuals who are going to clean up corruption.
And ‘drain the swamp’ was actually, you know, Mussolini’s slogan. I remember Trump said, ‘Oh, I’m not going to take a salary,’ well Hitler also said he’s not taking a salary and then he had the Gestapo destroy the records that he never paid his taxes.
So the essence of authoritarianism is not just getting away with it, but it’s turning public office into a mechanism for private profit because you don’t recognize any difference between public and personal,
and you have no government ethics. And Orban is extremely skilled at this. He’s used all the tricks where, you know, he rails against globalists and then all of these people keep their money probably in offshore, global network of offshore finance.
And ultimately, the state becomes a predator and, just like in Turkey and in Russia and Hungary, if you have a flourishing business one of our bonds cronies will come and uh force you to sell your your assets.
And so this is really, and this happens in Russia and Turkey and it’s part of authoritarianism, and yet, we fall for this charade of them as globalist champions of the people.
Yeah there’s also an aspect to the press here that I think is crucial and important. Ian, you know, when I was coming up as a reporter in Chicago that kind of story, this story, is the stuff that local corruption reporting was made of.
And when there was power in the local press that would hurt it would hurt you. It would be on the cover of the local paper and then the aldermen would have to be like, ‘Why are you paying off your restaurant lien and campaign money,’
and i feel like you know a lot of Boebert’s followers, a lot of the folks that vote for her and her supporters, don’t read the Denver Post.
They don’t trust the fake news and it sort of plays the role of insulating from these very standard corruption stories. I mean the irony of it all, of course, is that Boebert refuses to talk to any local reporters in Colorado,
and only goes on fake news stations like OANN and Newsmax and the other right-wing fever-swamp, weird, fake-news stations that are all over the country.
She’s never spoken to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, which is a newspaper in her district.
She doesn’t talk to the Denver Post, ever. Wow.
And it’s because she will craft her own narrative and control her own story.
The other thing to note is that her restaurant lost $143,000 dollars in 2019 and $226,000 dollars in 2020.
This is not like a successful business that she, like, forgot to pay unemployment insurance on, or she forgot to pay her rent once in a while.
This is the entire problem, is that she’s a failed business person and she’s using her campaign funds to paper it over.
It’s a house of cards and at some point the whole thing is going to fall down.
Yeah. That’s why, uh, that’s why power is so attractive Ruth, right? Because it’s a way to keep the house of cards up.
Oh totally. And, you know we just lived through this.
I still, I think we should talk about this: every single day, from 2017 to 2020, Trump spent one-third of his time in office visiting Trump properties.
I mean, you know the thing is they’re not interested in governing, they’re interested in, uh, generating profits for themselves.
And so you know, Boebert is a symptom of this kind of, uh, what we’ve lived through.
We still haven’t fully reckoned with some kind of breakdown of government ethics.
Thank you very much.