The campaign of progressive California Rep. Maxine Waters has agreed to pay a $68,000 fine after an investigation revealed that it broke many election regulations.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) stated in a batch of documents that the longtime House lawmaker’s 2020 campaign group, Citizens for Waters, violated many campaign finance regulations.
The FEC accused Citizens for Waters of “failing to accurately report receipts and disbursements in calendar year 2020,” “knowingly accepting excessive contributions,” and “making prohibited cash disbursements,” according to one document that appears to be a legally binding agreement that allows both parties to avoid court.
Waters’ committee agreed to pay the civil fine as well as “send its treasurer to a Commission-sponsored training program for political committees within one year of the effective date of this Agreement.”
“Respondent shall submit evidence of the required registration and attendance at such event to the Commission,” the document said.
According to the inquiry, Citizens for Waters took inappropriate campaign contributions from seven persons totaling $19,000 in 2019 and 2020, even though the maximum allowed individual contribution is $2,800.
The committee offloaded those excessive donations, albeit in an “untimely” fashion, the document said.
Waters’ campaign committee also “made four prohibited cash disbursements that were each in excess of $100, totaling $7,000,” the FEC said.
The campaign committee “contends that it retained legal counsel to provide advice and guidance to the treasurer and implemented procedures to ensure the disbursements comply with the requirements of the Act.”
Leilani Beaver, Citizens for Waters’ attorney, wrote to the FEC last year, claiming that the campaign financing infractions were “errors” that “were not willful or purposeful.”
Waters, the leading Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, has been in Congress since 1991.
OpenSecrets was the first to report the fresh movements in the inquiry.
Waters has previously drawn public attention for a very similar thing.
In 2023, a Fox News Digital investigation discovered that Waters’ campaign paid her daughter $192,300 for a “slate mailer” operation between January 2021 and December 2022.
Waters reportedly paid her daughter a single dollar out of thousands for campaign labor.
The FEC dismissed a charge alleging Waters’ campaign accepted improper campaign donations in 2018 by a 5-1 vote.
Waters previously made headlines when she made a series of nasty comments about First Lady Melania Trump.
Waters called on President Donald Trump to investigate and potentially deport First Lady Melania Trump during an anti-DOGE protest in Los Angeles last weekend.
Clips of the rant went viral as Waters suggested that the first lady’s citizenship status- she’s been a U.S. citizen since 2006- should be scrutinized as a means of pushing back on the president’s executive order eliminating birthright citizenship.
“When he [Trump] talks about birthright, and he’s going to undo the fact that the Constitution allows those who are born here, even if the parents are undocumented, they have a right to stay in America. If he wants to start looking so closely to find those who were born here and their parents were undocumented, maybe he ought to first look at Melania,” Waters was seen saying from the stage of a rally in Los Angeles, per a number of videos posted online.
“We don’t know whether or not her parents were documented. And maybe we better just take a look,” the aged congresswoman continued.
Prior to that, she erupted in outrage and screeched her disapproval of both Trump and tech mogul Elon Musk at an event in Washington, D.C.
At a rally held by Democratic lawmakers protesting Musk’s access to information at the Treasury Department, Waters accused him of overstepping his boundaries without the consent of voters during her speech.
“We have got to tell Elon Musk that nobody elected your ass. Nobody told you you could get all of our private information. Nobody told you you could be in charge of the payments of this country,” Waters yelled.
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