Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik keep yowling that Joe Biden should be held responsible for son Hunter Biden’s wrongdoing, which he has been trying to make amends for. So, I’m sure we’ll be getting huge mea culpas from these two congresswomen any minute for hiring guys who ripped off a suffering Ohio community after a toxic train derailment, right? Yeah, that’s a joke.
From Cleveland.com:
Under a settlement announced Thursday by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, Isaiah Wartman and Luke Mahoney of WAMA Strategies must pay more than $22,000 in restitution to a local food bank, as well as $3,000 in investigative costs and fees to Yost’s office.
Michael Peppel, the co-founder of the fake charity, called the Ohio Clean Water Fund, agreed to pay a $25,000 civil penalty and a lifetime ban on him starting, running or soliciting for any charity in Ohio, according to a Yost release.
Wartman and Mahoney were fundraisers for the Ohio Clean Water Fund, a fake charity that collected nearly $149,000 from donors in the aftermath of the Feb. 3 derailment, which released toxic chemicals into the area, leading to evacuations and reports of health issues.
The article notes that Wartman has worked as Greene’s campaign manager and a senior adviser while Mahoney was a campaign staffer for Stefanik. “The two formed WAMA Strategies earlier this year, according to a Politico article that ran Feb. 4, one day after the derailment,” Cleveland.com reported. What a coinkydink!
Greene either did no research into the people to whom she doled out her own donor-funded dollars or else she happily used their money to hire scammers. “Greene’s campaign paid WAMA Strategies nearly $71,000 in total between April 1 and late June of this year for fundraising consulting, according to her latest Federal Election Commission filing, Cleveland.com said.
Wartman and Mahoney claim they had absolutely no idea that they were raising money for a fake charity run by Peppel. Just because he was convicted in 2013 for conspiracy, securities fraud and money laundering, fined $5 million and received a two-year prison sentence, why the heck should Greene’s and Stefanik’s pals have had any reason to ensure the $149,000 they raised actually helped the afflicted residents of East Palestine?
From ABC News:
Bryan Kostura, an attorney representing Wartman and Mahoney, told the news outlet that the two men were both victims of a fraud perpetrated by Peppel and cooperated with Yost's investigation. He said that, once they realized they'd been “bamboozled,” they “did what was right and gave back all of their profits for this entire engagement to the people of East Palestine.”
Or to put it another way, once the MTG and Stefanik cronies were caught, they agreed to send the money where they said it would go, turned on their buddy and made a better deal for themselves.
Peppel, by the way, has worked as a senior legislative aide to Republican state Sen Michael Rulli and as Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson’s campaign political director.
I don’t know about you but a $25,000 penalty, presumably shared by Wartman and Mahoney, seems like an awfully low punishment for such a despicable rip-off, even though the so-called charity has agreed to send another $132,000 to the food bank, according to Cleveland.com.
