Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi often plays fast and loose.
This time it came back to bite her.
And Pelosi was forced to admit in court she got caught breaking one law.
Pelosi’s latest federal election commission report listed a $7,500 payment to an Illinois man named Jorge Rojas.
Rojas sued Pelosi over Pelosi’s campaign spamming him with 21 fundraising text messages over an eight month period.
Business Insider reports:
According to the suit, Rojas received 21 texts from Pelosi’s campaign from November 2021 to July 2022 despite previously placing himself on the registry in 2008 to “obtain solitude from invasive and harassing telemarketing calls.”
He went on to argue that he “experienced frustration, annoyance, irritation, and a sense that his privacy has been invaded” by the texts.
Rojas’ lawsuit alleged Pelosi’s campaign violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which allows Americans to put their name on a do not call list.
The lawsuit about Pelosi spamming Rojas with text messages called attention to the disparate treatment by tech companies on how they handle Democrat and Republican fundraising appeals.
In a February 2023 Los Angeles Times column entitled “Why Won’t Nancy Pelosi Stop Emailing Me?” Nicholas Goldberg complained about emails signed by Pelosi for the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee asking for money for candidates whose email lists he never signed up for that appeared in his inbox.
Goldberg wrote:
The fundraising pleas I get are mostly from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and from a handful of politicians whose lists I’ve somehow fallen onto. They’re sent under the names of members of Congress such as Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Hakeem Jeffries, with cameos from Barack Obama, Joe Biden and others. If I choose to contribute, my money is routed through the digital donation platform ActBlue.
I’ve never signed up to be on their lists. I’ve never donated to the candidates in question.
I’m supposed to be flattered, I guess, that these bigwigs are taking time to write to me personally, relying on the use of first names to sound chummy. “Adam suggested I get in touch with you,” wrote Stacey Abrams, when she was running for governor. “Nick, I’m disgusted,” wrote Pelosi. “I wanted to tell you personally.”
Google’s been disproportionately flagging emails like this from Republicans as spam while allowing Democrat appeals to go straight to inboxes.
That created a massive disparity in how much money Democrats can raise online compared to Republicans.
In the last election, Democrats swamped the GOP in the money race, which allowed them to grow their Senate majority.
This was helped in part by tech companies providing favorable treatment for Democrat fundraising appeals.
