Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) campaign is in damage control after it was reported that her friend and former intern - the ex-gay, antisemitic, racist, homophobic, and transphobic troll Milo Yiannopoulos - allegedly scammed her out of over $7,000 and then took nearly $10,000 from Kanye West.
"Congresswoman Greene knew nothing about the gross negligence made by a vendor and is being unfairly attacked as a result," a consultant for Greene's campaign, Isaiah Wartman, said in a statement. "The campaign was told the purchase was refunded. This wasn't the case."
She defended Alex Jones while her intern called for "meaningful penalties for insulting, irreverent or contemptuous language about Our Lord."
At issue is the purchase of the domain name Ye2024.com in late 2022, when Yiannopoulos was working for West to help advance his political ambitions, including his announced 2024 presidential campaign.
The Daily Beast reported that a charge on a card in the name of Wartman was used to make a $7020.16 payment to GoDaddy to buy the domain name on November 22, 2022, the same day that Yiannopoulos orchestrated a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. A receipt for the transaction shows Yiannopoulos's cell phone number. Greene's FEC filings show that Wartman was reimbursed for the expense.
That same day, the Kanye 2020 campaign reimbursed Yiannopoulos for a domain transfer in the amount of $9,955. The increased price from what Greene's campaign was billed for could be another domain name.
Kanye 2020's treasurer Patrick Krason later resigned and raised concerns about campaign finance violations by Yiannopoulos in his resignation letter, including "an expense for a digital asset where Yiannopoulos allegedly sought reimbursement from both Kanye 2020 and the campaign of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene," according to Politico. Krason said that transaction occurred in November 2022
If Greene's campaign gave over $7000 to West's, that would violate campaign finance rules since it's over the maximum donation allowed, which is $2000 per year.
"That is on its face an excessive, prohibited contribution," said Saurav Ghosh, Federal Campaign Finance Reform Legal Director for the Campaign Legal Center. "Whether Marjorie Taylor Greene or her senior staffers knew about it, the value was well in excess of the amount that one campaign can legally contribute to another campaign."
Moreover, West is likely to run for president in 2024, and he will be running against Donald Trump. Greene is fiercely loyal to Trump, and many of her supporters are likely loyal to him as well. She may not want to have to explain why her campaign bought Trump's opponent's website.
Yiannopoulos denies any wrongdoing. He posted on the rightwing social media app Telegram that all that happened was "the wrong card was allegedly accidentally charged for 24 hours." He told Rolling Stone that he re-did the transaction with GoDaddy on another card. Rolling Stone notes that there's no proof, though, that the original $7020.16 charge listed on the Greene campaign's FEC records was ever reversed.
"For Milo Yiannopoulos, it seems like embezzlement - what under the law is called 'conversion to personal use' of the Kanye West campaign's funds," Ghosh said. "In essence, he was getting reimbursed for something that he didn't pay for."
He explained that Greene's campaign could still be fined even if the transaction was unauthorized.
Yiannopoulos, to defend himself, said that he charges $40,000 a month for political consulting, and so he would only steal "for more than ten thousand." He said that despite those terms, he "never will" steal.
In June 2022, Greene confirmed that she had hired Yiannopoulos as an intern after he was spotted hanging out with her congressional staff.
"There would be a lot of people I'd love to invite to this roundtable. I see someone standing behind you right there - Milo Yiannopoulus - I think he'd be a great person to have there," Greene said.
Yiannopolous rose to fame on the right by attacking transgender people, and he got himself banned from Twitter for harassing actor Leslie Jones for her role in the Ghostbusters movie. He was out as gay at the time and made it a central part of his act.
In 2017, Yiannopoulos was fired from Breitbart News after videos surfaced featuring Yiannopoulos condoning statutory rape and sexual relationships between boys and men. While defending himself, Yiannopoulos revealed his own relationship with a 29-year-old man while he was 17. The age of consent in the U.K. is 16.
In the fallout, Yiannopoulos lost his job and a book deal. A scheduled speaking engagement at UC Berkeley was canceled after student protests turned violent.
Yiannopoulos claimed that he was so devastated by Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 elections that he renounced homosexuality several months later, a performance he made complete by allegedly throwing a $150,000 "sodomy stone" engagement ring into the ocean.
Last year, Yiannopoulos called for executing "unrepentant sodomites," including gay conservative podcaster Dave Rubin.