You might have heard the name Lauren Boebert recently. She’s the newly elected, gun-loving, Colorado Republican who is suspected in having colluded a little bit with various members of the Jan. 6 insurgency on our Capitol building. She’s a QAnon fan, and like most Republicans climbing the social ladder while giving full-throated support to every fact-free conspiracy theory MAGA supporters voice, it seems she’s a bit loosey-goosey with how she makes her money.
The Denver Post reports that Rep. Lauren Boebert wrote herself two checks from her campaign account, totaling $22,259 for “mileage,” between January and mid-November of 2020. Using the IRS’s mileage rate of “57.5 cents per mile for 2020,” that would mean that the congresswoman drove about 38,712 miles in that time. But, as the Post points out, Boebert’s campaign had “no publicly advertised campaign events in March, April or July, and only one in May.” To put this into perspective, Boebert’s predecessor Rep. Scott Tipton reimbursed himself $9,575 from his business account for mileage … over 10 years in office.
Maybe she had to drive every single resident of her state back and forth to the polls? Probably not. And there’s more.
According to the report, the two checks are also what one might call a red flag, as the first one is for $1,060 at the end of March, while the second one is over $21,000 on Nov. 11. This means that “Boebert would have had to drive 36,870 miles in just over seven months between April 1 and Nov. 11 to justify the second payment.” The Earth’s circumference is 24,901 miles all the way around. Maybe Boebert is adding in the mileage of her conspiracy-addled brain spinning and spinning? Hard to say. Her campaign’s response is that Boebert’s intense travel was how she won.
This is probably true. Getting out and about helped the gun-toting policy-free campaign she was running to beat out Trump-supported Tipton in the primaries, but 38,712 miles, over a few months during that time? Unlikely. The Denver Post, using Boebert’s Facebook and other public campaign event schedules, was able to come up with less than half those miles traveled by Boebert.
Rep. Boebert has been very directly linked to MAGA-types involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol building insurrection. Her opinions on our democracy have also been very clear for some time—she isn’t a fan of majority rule. It’s people like Boebert and their gun fetishisms that have led to the House chambers having a new metal detecting system, as well as new fines for members breaking those rules.
Boebert’s sketchy campaign finance issues look like the symptoms of the sociopathic entitlement felt by all scam artists. Whether it’s fake medicine to make money off scared people, or fake revolution to make money off of scared people, the Republican Party seems to have locked into exactly how their bread is buttered.
