VICE: Pay to play?
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) received new information on Tuesday from the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog, about a complaint alleging that the GEO Group violated a federal ban on political contributions by government contractors...
ut Brendan Fischer, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, alleges that the GEO Group and its subsidiary are essentially one and the same. GEO Corrections Holdings Inc. is headquartered at the same address as the GEO Group, and it employs all of its parent company’s corporate staff.
“GEO Group and GEO Corrections Holdings Inc. really seem indistinguishable, and their corporate interests are the same,” Fischer said. “Their goal is to influence the federal contracting process, which is exactly what the contractor ban is designed to prevent.”
Fischer noted that the FEC filings list the first donation from the GEO subsidiary to the Trump super PAC as coming on August 19, one day after the Justice Department announced plans to phase out the use of privately run federal prisons because they “do not maintain the same level of safety and security” as government-run facilities, and “do not save substantially on costs.”