Val Hoyle and La Mota: My FEC complaint

Hoyle may have accepted and unlawfully retained cash contributions from La Mota founders, adding to her growing list of first-term scandals.

U.S. Representative Val Hoyle with fellow La Mota pal Shemia Fagan wearing their Eastern Oregon costumes.

Last week, I filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against first-term Democrat Congresswoman Val Hoyle, who represents Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, because I believe Hoyle accepted and retained until May 2023 $5,800 in cash contributions from cannabis company La Mota founders Rosa Cazares and Aaron Mitchell in 2022. Federal law prohibits making campaign contributions in excess of $100 and requires candidates to return cash contributions exceeding $100 “to promptly return” such excess to the contributor.

I described the facts underlying my complaint in detail back in June. In a nutshell, the Hoyle campaign reported receiving seven separate contributions totaling $5,800 from Cazares and Mitchell on April 30, 2022. Willamette Week reported Cazares and Mitchell regularly contributed cash bags of cash to the campaigns of other Oregon Democrats.

Hoyle’s campaign donated $5,800 to Democrat-allied nonprofit Oregon Tradeswomen on May 12, 2023, an effort to shed the stink of the Cazares and Mitchell contributions once the pair’s influence over Oregon Democrats, especially since-resigned Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, became the subject of media scrutiny. My complaint alleges Hoyle was not entitled under federal law to retain the contributions, if they were made in cash, for over a year spanning her primary and general election victories.

My belief that the Cazares and Mitchell contributions were made in cash was bolstered by a July email exchange with Hoyle’s spokesperson. She was helpful answering my questions about the campaign’s donation to Oregon Tradeswomen, but when I asked in separate emails to the spokesperson’s House of Representatives and gmail addresses about whether Cazares and Mitchell contributed cash, she did not respond.

The process by which the FEC processes complaints is opaque, to say the least. I do not expect to hear from the FEC about what is going on with my complaint until it either dismisses it or takes some enforcement action. I’ll provide you, dear reader, with an update whenever I hear something.

Hoyle’s has racked up a truly impressive record of scandal for a first-term House member, some of which stem from her prior job as Commissioner of the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI). Willamette Week’s Sophie Peel keeps turning up new information about the $500,000 BOLI grant Hoyle helped steer to a Cazares-founded nonprofit. Peel discovered that Hoyle had dinner with Cazares before BOLI issued the grant; Hoyle had previously said “I don’t recall. I might have. I’m not saying I did or didn’t,” when asked if she had discussed the grant with Cazares. “I’m not saying I did or didn’t” is, well, it does not exactly inspire confidence.

Peel reported this week that Hoyle has sat on official BOLI communications on her cell phone for eight months despite requests for the same from the agency.

In winning her first House campaign last year, Hoyle enjoyed the support of not only the La Mota crew, but also alleged campaign finance fraudster and former crypto currency executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who funded a political action committee that spent $500,000 making sure Hoyle won the Democratic nomination for the seat she now holds. The U.S. Department of Justice has accused Bankman-Fried and his former associate Nishad Singh of illegally funneling corporate and other funds into campaigns in 2022.

With a federal grand jury probing the extent of Cazares’s and Mitchell’s influence on Democrats in Oregon and the Oregon Department of Justice supposedly investigating Singh’s Oregon contributions, it is likely more bad news awaits Hoyle. She won her seat by a respectable if not resounding seven points in 2022, and national observers view her district as a potentially competitive (if Democrat-leaning) seat in 2024.

Hoyle’s rapidly growing list of scandals in her first term is reminiscent of the cascading self-inflicted crises that forced Republican Wes Cooley to abandon his 1996 re-election effort in Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District. Reporters then would not let voters ignore Cooley’s record of lying about his marital status, education and military service, and rightly so.

Hoyle, so far, lacks the admitted and proven wrongdoing that forced Cooley to succumb. But Hoyle’s term is yet young, her challenges multiplying.