Democrat Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT) used campaign funds to pay her family to manage “personal passwords and calendars.”
The Daily Caller reported on Tuesday that Hayes paid her two children more than $36,000 from her campaign fund since taking office in 2018.
During Q4 2021, Hayes used her campaign fund, called “Friends of Jahana Hayes,” to pay her son $15,118.54 since entering Congress.
During Q4 2021, “Friends of Jahana Hayes” paid Hayes’ daughter Asia Clermont $2,551.41 from her campaign fund in increments of $359.25 each, and since entering Congress, she has paid her daughter $21,299.03.
These payments were marked under “payroll,” according to Federal Election Commission records.
After the initial report, Hayes reportedly told the Daily Caller her two children work on her reelection campaign. More recently, Hayes doubled down on the “deeply important” campaign work her two children do, which includes managing “personal passwords and calendars.”
Hayes told local news:
The positions that you’re asking about are handling of my personal passwords and calendars and things that are deeply important, so to have someone stay on after the election season and have the consistency and also the trust… again it’s not uncommon.
Hayes’s Republican challenger, George Logan, said the payments indicate a “culture of entitlement.
“They may allow it but that doesn’t mean it’s right,” Logan said. “We’re asking for two aspects to be looked at right? One is whether the work is real and whether the pay is legitimate.”
“This isn’t about scoring political points. This is about a culture of entitlement,” he added.
“Jahana Hayes would have been better off not admitting she’s paying her children tens of thousands of dollars to write down passwords,” one Republican strategist said.