Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez truly despises the 1%, so much so that when she attended the world’s number one social event for the rich and famous — attended by the top 0.000002% — she wore a dress emblazoned with a slash of red that said “Tax The Rich.”
But the Democratic socialist has, once again, proved her deep hypocrisy and sense of entitlement. She had begged for free tickets (worth $70,000), stiffed the makers of her dress and the hotel where she stayed for months, and then sought to cover up the whole mess, according to House investigators probing her for ethics violations.
AOC makes $174,000 a year — putting her far ahead of the average American — drives a Tesla, and lives in a luxury apartment building in a posh D.C. neighborhood where even a studio apartment costs more than $2,000 a month (she’s got an infinity pool, which might equal her ego).
And that’s still not enough. The 33-year-old former bartender decided she wanted to rub elbows with the rich and beautiful people in Manhattan at the 2021 annual Met Gala. But she didn’t want to pay. Please. A pair of tickets costs $70,000 — if you could get them. It’s pretty much an invite-only kinda’ deal.
So the media darling traded off her position to get an invite — helped along “after much prodding by her campaign staffer,” the New York Post reported. She cozied up to the super-famous Vogue’s Anna Wintour, who runs the Gala, and got an invitation for her and her boyfriend that said they’d be “guests of Vogue.”
But new documents from the Congressional Ethics Committee investigation into her attendance revealed that her lawyers had cautioned her against attending the Gala, noting that she couldn’t accept a gift that large. The rule is clear: Lawmakers are prohibited from accepting gifts from companies that use lobbyists which Vogue’s parent company, Advance Media Publications, does.
In a message to her staff before the Gala, an attorney for AOC advised her how she could attend legally. “‘The Congresswoman could accept an invitation from [the Met], but not from Vogue,’ he wrote, according to the Daily Mail. “Since Advance Publications is a registered lobbyist, we’ll need to be extra careful!”
That’s seems pretty clear. But AOC attended anyway, making a splash with that dress. Shortly afterward, the documents show she (or maybe her staff), sought to downplay it all. Damn the little people, let them eat … whatever they eat, who knows.
Then the coverup began, The Mail reported.
“The day after the gala however, Vogue staffers reached out to AOC’s office to inform them they had received a number of media inquiries about the nature of the congresswoman’s attendance, and to say they were telling outlets she had been Wintour’s personal guest instead of saying she was a guest of the magazine.
“‘Hope the [C]ongresswoman had a great time last night!,’ a Vogue staffer wrote. ‘We have had a number of inquiries re: AOC’s invitation and if she paid for her ticket. Mainly from Page Six,'” of the New York Post.
“We also alerted the museum. Given that she was a guest of Vogue, we were planning to say on background that she was a guest of Anna [Wintour]’s. Of course wanted to check with you before responding.'”
Huh. Sure seems like a lot of revisionist history. So, there’s that.
But there’s so much more that has emerged from the House probe that shows the true nature of AOC.
The documents also show that AOC was billed $1,300 for her dress, but her staff was able to cut $1,100 cut off the price tag, along with getting the price of her $635 shoes knocked down by listing them as rentals, too, the Mail reported.
The socialist then failed to pay back thousands of dollars in bills from the Gala night, including $344.85 in makeup costs that had to be passed on to a collections agency as “extremely overdue.”
She also took so long to pay back $477.73 for hair styling that a a rep for the stylist “reached out to her staff and said ‘it would look terrible if we had to file a complaint with the NY Dept of Labor against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,'” the Mail reported. It took her nearly a year to pay that bill, Business Insider reported.
And it took eight months for her to pay more than $1,000 for transportation that was footed by Conde Nast, and she took nearly a year to pay $4,602.92 in bills at the Carlisle Hotel from the evening, according to the Post.
“In addition, a publicist associated with the company that supplied Ocasio-Cortez with her rental items — a gown, a handbag and shoes — provided a final invoice to the campaign staffer in September 2021 for about $990, but it went unpaid for months. The company then identified in April that $5,579.99 worth of unpaid goods and services had been provided to Ocasio-Cortez and her partner for the event, the report said,” NBC News reported.
By the way, it’s worth noting that AOC only paid her bills after House investigators began their probe.
As liberals do, AOC passed the buck. It wasn’t her, it was her incompetent staff.
“I just never, ever, ever would have allowed that to happen knowing what I have learned, but that I wasn’t privy to the invoices, wasn’t privy to the ones that had been sent,” she told investigators, the Mail reported.
“And it is just a deeply regrettable situation. I feel l terrible for especially the small businesses that were impacted.” She then pulled a great Nixonian excuse: “There was a ball that was dropped.”
Aw, poor AOC. Everyone she has hired is incompetent. That’s horrible.
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AOC brought in her lawyer, David Mitrani, to explain. He said the congresswoman “finds these [payment] delays unacceptable, and she has taken several steps to ensure nothing of this nature will ever happen again.”
Ocasio-Cortez talks a good game about the oppressed … but the businesses she owed money to are the oppressed. And AOC didn’t give a whit about them until investigators came asking questions.
There’s another Democratic socialist in Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). He owns three houses and is a multimillionaire.
AOC is well on her way to following in his footsteps.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.