Lauren Boebert’s Venmo scandal keeps getting uglier for her

| 12:01 pm EDT September 24, 2021
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What is it with insurrectionist House Republicans and Venmo? Millions of Americans use the virtual cash app to move money around, but it seems the worst House GOP members seem to have some trouble with it. Matt Gaetz is famously under federal criminal investigation for alleged Venmo payments in exchange for sex. Now Lauren Boebert has a different kind of Venmo scandal.

If you use campaign funds for personal expenses, it’s a big no-no. It’s ugly enough that if it can be proven you did it on purpose, you to go prison. In fact we’ve seen members of Congress indicted for it. Now it turns out Lauren Boebert used thousands of dollars in campaign money to pay for personal expenses through the Venmo app.

She says it was an honest error, and that’s certainly possible. But as evidenced by the latest reporting from the Denver Post newspaper, this is a scandal that just won’t die. It keeps going and going. If this was an honest mistake, it should have been dead and buried by now.

Instead, the Federal Election Commission is now “consider taking further legal action” against Boebert. What does this mean? It’s not clear. The FEC’s ability to enforce penalties is pretty narrow these days. But Boebert had better hope the FEC doesn’t determine that the Venmo payments were an intentional misuse of campaign funds, because if that’s the case, the FEC can kick it over to the DOJ, and that’s where it would get truly ugly for her.