Federal officials are calling shenanigans on a new 2024 presidential candidate who purports to be President Joe Biden himself — but almost certainly is not.
"It has come to the attention of the Federal Election Commission that you may have failed to include true, correct, or complete candidate information," FEC senior campaign finance analyst Jacqueline Gausepohl wrote Wednesday to "Mr Joseph R Biden Jr" in a letter obtained by Raw Story.
"Mr Joseph R Biden Jr" filed organizational documents with the FEC on March 31 and listed his mailing address as an office and medical building in Washington, D.C.
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The most obvious indication that this candidate filing is a fake is the fact that Biden already has a presidential campaign committee, registered to a different address, from his run for the White House in 2020. While Biden has not officially declared that he is running for re-election in 2024, his existing committee is ready to serve as his re-election campaign vehicle upon his announcement.
Moreover, the fake Biden filing refers to "Mrs. Kamala Harris" as Biden's running mate — Vice President Kamala Harris and her associates are not known to use the honorific "Mrs." in political contexts.
It's unclear who's attempting to impersonate Biden; the White House did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment.
Fake political candidates and committees have become a sort of bureaucratic plague for federal regulators in recent years.
In December, for example, someone created a federal political committee indicating that former Vice President Mike Pence had formed a 2024 presidential campaign committee. But the committee was a fraud, and Pence's representatives scrambled to correct the record and debunk several premature media reports that Pence, who has yet to formally declare his intentions, had entered the race.
A parade of other bogus filings have also served to cause confusion, and sometimes, even threatening situations, such as when people have used FEC documents to launch racist screeds or doxx their enemies.
It takes little time and effort to create a federal political committee, at least on paper. But once done, a federal record is automatically generated and posted publicly to FEC.gov, the agency's website.
The FEC notes that "knowingly and willfully making any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation to a federal government agency" is a violation of federal law, and the FEC is "authorized to report apparent violations to the appropriate law enforcement agencies."
But the FEC, an independent, bipartisan civil regulatory agency that only has the power to seek civil penalties against suspected bad actors, rarely asks the Department of Justice to pursue such matters.
The most it's likely to do, as noted in its letter to the fake Biden, is removing the fake presidential candidate filing from the FEC's main public database "and placing the filings under the unverified filings database on the Commission's website."
The fake Biden has 35 calendar days to respond to the FEC's strongly worded letter before that happens, according to the agency.
