(Headline USA) Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., paid her daughter nearly $200,000 in campaign cash during the 2022 election cycle, according to a new report.
Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by Fox News show Waters’s campaign paid Karen Waters $192,300 for a “slate mailer” operation between Jan. 2021 and Dec. 2022. Slate-mailing is where a consulting firm is hired to create a pamphlet or mailer that contains a list of candidates and policy measures, and advises voters how to cast their ballots.
Very few politicians use slate-mailing, but Waters has relied on the operation since 2004.
Her daughter has managed the operation for her campaign for years, raking in more than $1.2 million in payments from her mother’s campaign over the past several years.
Karen Waters is not the only family member to have received campaign cash from Waters’s campaign. Maxine Waters’s son, Edward Jr., also shared in the slate mail proceeds and occasionally worked as a consultant to other campaigns his mother backed.
Rep. Maxine Waters defended paying her family members for their services, arguing they run legitimate businesses.
“They do their business and I do mine,” she claimed. “We are not bad people.”
Several other Democrats have come under fire for paying family members from their campaigns as well. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for example, quietly funneled campaign funds to her husband’s consulting firm just weeks after they were married.
In total, Omar’s husband received a whopping $878,930.65 from Omar’s campaign since he began working for her in 2018.
President Joe Biden’s family also has exploited a number of ethical loopholes. During Biden’s Senate career his sister, Valerie, who functioned as his longtime campaign manager, was paid from campaign funds for public relations work she performed, while also drawing a salary from the PR firm, according to Peter Schweizer‘s Profiles in Corruption.
