Not according to Hoyle? La Mota owners' funky contributions to U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle

Congresswoman Val Hoyle's campaign reported it received seven separate donations from the cash-friendly owners of La Mota on the same day in 2022. If made in cash, that's a problem for Hoyle.

U.S. Representative Val Hoyle (D-OR) received an unusual number of donations from the owners of cannabis firm La Mota and later supported an illegal grant to a La Mota-affiliated nonprofit.

On April 30, 2022, the campaign of first-term Oregon Congresswoman Val Hoyle, a Democrat, received seven separately reported contributions totaling $5,800 from the owners of cannabis firm La Mota, according to federal campaign finance records, raising questions about whether Hoyle accepted the donations in cash, which would be a violation of federal campaign finance rules.

Shemia Fagan was forced to resign as Oregon Secretary of State earlier this year because of disclosure of a consulting contract she had executed with a sister company of La Mota, while Fagan’s office was completing an audit of state cannabis regulations. Campaign donations from Cazares, Mitchell and La Mota are under intense media scrutiny.

La Mota and its owners, Rosa Cazares and Aaron Mitchell made many of their voluminous 2022 contributions to Oregon Democrats in bags of cash, according to Willamette Week. The same WW story reports Mitchell’s attorney claimed in a November 2022 court filing that Mitchell did not even possess bank or credit card accounts in his name.

Federal campaign finance rules prohibit congressional candidates from receiving more than $100.00 in cash contributions from any one source. The maximum any individual could lawfully donate in the primary election of 2022 was $2,900.

Federal Election Commission records showing seven separate donations from La Mota owners Rosa Cazares and Aaron Mitchell to then-congressional candidate Val Hoyle

The fact of seven separate reported donations from two related donors to the same campaign on the same date is unusual. Federal campaigns are supposed to report joint donations from married couples as coming from each person in equal amounts. It’s possible checks from one or more joint Cazares-Mitchell checking accounts or jointly held credit cards explain the two matching $1,000 contributions and the $800 matching contribution. But what about the extra $200 from Cazares, which the campaign attributed to the general rather than the primary election to keep her under the contribution limit? And, did Mitchell even have checking or credit card accounts in April 2022, considering his lawyer’s representation to the contrary seven months later?

Furthermore, consider the $200 discrepancy in reported donations from Cazares versus Mitchell. The couple presumably intended the total of $5,800 to be split between them, maximizing the amount they could each legally donate in the primary election, which was mere weeks away at the time. Yet, $200 more was attributed to Cazares. Is it more likely the $200 discrepancy arose from errors in check-writing or credit card swiping or someone sticking a $100 bill in the wrong bag?

If those contributions were made in cash, for example in separate bags from different La Mota retail outlets, Hoyle would have violated the $100 cash contribution limit. Moreover, if this is what happened, Mitchell and Cazares may have violated federal laws (with which Oregonians are becoming intimately familiar) against misrepresenting the source of the donation and corporate contributions.

To clarify, we don’t know whether Cazares or Mitchell made any of the seven separately reported donations in cash. I am speculating based on previous reporting about the La Mota clan’s affinity for making cash donations to Oregon Democrats, and the oddly large number of separate donations reported on April 30, 2022. Hoyle has not said publicly in what form the donations were made. She told KOIN she had, as of May 4, 2023, returned all donations from La Mota’s owners.

Cazares’s and Mitchell’s donations to Hoyle’s congressional campaign are just a piece of the relationship between the three. Willamette Week reported that when Hoyle was Commissioner of the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, the job she held before serving in Congress, but in the thick of her congressional race she helped direct a $500,000-plus grant to ENDVR, a non-profit corporation co-founded by Cazares and Laura Vega, to help train cannabis workers.

BOLI approved the grant, which Hoyle repeatedly pushed, in August 2022, after Cazares and Mitchell donated to Hoyle’s congressional campaign but before the couple became politically toxic. For her part, Vega, Cazares’s non-profit cofounder, donated $1,000 to Hoyle’s congressional campaign, the biggest federal donation Vega has made. That donation was received by the Hoyle campaign just six days before the Cazares/Mitchell donation-o-rama in April 2022.

The kicker: BOLI this year had to revoke the ENDVR grant, and claw back the unspent funds, because it realized after it issued that grant that it was illegal. The grant used federal funds and cannabis remains illegal under federal law.

I’m not even kidding. Welcome to Oregon.