I pulled every electronic filing Lauren Boebert’s campaign and her six joint fundraising committees have submitted to the FEC since she first filed in late 2019. Not the summaries. The raw files, line by line, memo by memo, 107 reports with the amendments reconciled. Then I pulled the House of Representatives’ own Statement of Disbursements for every quarter she has been in office and laid her official payroll next to her campaign payroll.
What you get is a gravy train extraordinaire. Donors in DC, FL, Rifle, Grand Junction and Windsor thought they were buying a fighter. What they bought was a lavish lifestyle for the candidate, her family and a second paycheck for the favorites around her.
The numbers
From December 2019 through September 30, 2026, Lauren Boebert for Congress reported $16.8 million in receipts and $16.6 million in disbursements. Team Boebert JFC and the smaller victory funds controlled by her moved another $1.8 million. Of the campaign’s itemized spending, about $1.02 million went to travel across 1,456 transactions, and about $188,000 went to food and drink across 319 transactions.
A million flipping dollars in travel for a House seat. Two hundred flights on United and American. Two hundred twenty-one Uber rides. Enterprise rental cars in Sarasota, Florida, over and over again, including one billed to the 2022 recount account in March 2023. The recount was in Colorado.
The stuff you do not put on a campaign card
Start small. On July 12, 2024, the campaign paid $402.35 to Ray-Ban and called it “campaign attire.” That same reimbursement cycle included $240 to Halo Hair in Loveland, coded “debate prep.” The FEC has said for years that hair and clothing are personal expenses. Her compliance firm, Huckaby Davis Lisker, knows that. They filed it anyway.
Now go bigger. In June 2022 the campaign sent $36,000 to Post Hill Press, the publisher of her memoir. Another $6,000 followed in June 2023. Purpose: “Books.” A month before that first check, her campaign was running ads telling supporters to go buy the book. Her 2022 financial disclosure reported no royalty income. So the campaign bought tens of thousands of dollars of her own book from her own publisher, and we are supposed to believe none of that money found its way back to the author.
In May and June 2021 the campaign Venmo’d $6,650 to a man named John Pacheco in Rifle. The filing says “Rent/Utilities billed to campaign via Venmo in error.” She paid it back in July, after it showed up in the books. Rent. On a campaign card. By accident. Twice.
In 2026 the campaign started paying Vivint, a residential home alarm company, every month. She also expensed Starlink internet and a $1,163 Verizon bill. Safelite Autoglass got $2,635 across two visits, coded “travel/car repair.” Whose windshield?
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There is a $15,000 payment to Grand Canyon Scenic Airlines in February 2022, a sightseeing and charter outfit in Boulder City, Nevada. There are nine stays at the Tideline Ocean Resort and Spa in Palm Beach totaling $14,519. There is the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, the Waldorf Astoria, the Brown Palace, and a $741 “event catering” bill at the Rainforest Cafe at Disney World. There are 32 Instacart orders, 37 King Soopers runs and 45 Grubhub deliveries, most of them coded as event catering or meeting expense. Somebody is eating very well on the donors’ dime.
And there are the big checks nobody can explain. $50,000 to Rich Entertainment Touring in Nashville in the fall of 2022. $35,000 to Professional Bull Riders in May 2025 for “event site rental/tickets.” $4,148 to Sergio Gor, personally, for “event catering.” Sergio Gor is not a caterer. He is a Trump political operative.
You cannot read a motive off an FEC line, but you can add them up. I sorted every itemized disbursement into two tiers.
Tier one is spending that is hard to call anything but personal: $205,351 across 109 transactions. That is $78,652 in reimbursement checks written directly to Lauren Boebert, $42,000 for her own book, $38,126 in club memberships and dues at the Capitol Hill Club and the Conservative Partnership Center, $29,356 in clothing filed as campaign attire, $11,788 for the rent, the hair, the windshields, the home alarm, the Starlink and the Verizon bill, and $5,430 at the Apple Store.
Tier two is the lifestyle. Travel, $946,972. Meals, groceries, Instacart and restaurants, $165,050. Entertainment and tickets, $109,360, which covers $50,000 to Rich Entertainment Touring in Nashville, the outfit behind Kid Rock’s tours, $35,000 to Professional Bull Riders, $7,500 to a California worship singer named John Feucht for “event entertainment,” and $5,000 to Rhema Music in Fruita, CO. That tier comes to $1,221,382.
Put the two together and you get roughly $1.45 million, about nine cents of every dollar her donors sent, spent on things that ended up on her plate, on her back, on her face, in her garage or in her hotel room. The $205,000 she will have trouble explaining. The $1.45 million she will have trouble living down.
What she took home
Set the campaign aside for a second and just count what landed in Lauren Boebert’s own account.
Her congressional salary, January 3, 2021 through September 30, 2026, at the statutory $174,000 a year: $998,505. On top of that, the House reimbursed her personally $76,654, according to the Statement of Disbursements: $58,119 in Washington lodging, including the $2,000 a month housing allowance she has drawn nearly every month since it started in 2023, $12,880 in meals, $3,688 in taxis and rideshares, $1,967 in airfare. Then her campaign wrote her 29 reimbursement checks totaling $78,652.
That is $1,153,811 paid to Lauren Boebert by Lauren Boebert’s employer (the taxpayers), Lauren Boebert’s office budget, and Lauren Boebert’s donors. The taxpayers covered her rent. The donors covered her mileage. And she still charged the Ray-Bans to the campaign.
Code Red
A firm called Code Red Communications collected $256,212 from the campaign between August 2023 and October 2025 for “strategic consulting.” Its address on the filings moved from Grand Junction to Lone Tree in April 2024, right when she abandoned the Western Slope for the Fourth District. On December 6, 2024, a month after the election was over, the campaign cut Code Red a single check for $96,430.41.
Who owns Code Red Communications? What strategic consulting is worth $96,000 after the votes are counted? I do not know yet. I intend to find out.
The second paycheck
This is the part that should bother everyone, including the people who vote for her.
Thirteen people who drew a federal salary in her congressional office also drew checks from her campaign. Taxpayers paid those 13 people $3.85 million in House salary. The campaign paid them another $291,372 on top of it, most of it while they were on the House payroll.
Jeff Small was her chief of staff from January 2021 to January 2025. The taxpayers paid him $767,892 for that job. On December 13, 2022, the campaign paid him $28,057.69 for “strategic consulting/recount oversight.” On January 14, 2025, two weeks before he left the House payroll, the campaign paid him another $10,000 for “strategic consulting.” In between, the campaign reimbursed him $23,690 for travel and meals, much of it filed as “includes vendors not required to be itemized.” Translation: we are not telling you where the money went.
Raven Finegan joined the House office in September 2022 as a Western Slope field rep and was promoted to regional director, district director and then district chief of staff in under three years, $456,014 in taxpayer salary along the way. On top of that she took $55,707 from the campaign, $15,500 of it labeled recount oversight. Jasmine Higgs, listed by the House as a part-time employee paid $282,833 over four years, took $41,195, including a $15,000 check in May 2023 for “recount oversight.” Clarice Navarro, her other district director, took $18,996. Daniel Hungerford, Jacob Settle, Ben Stout, Tabby Rosenthal, McKenna Farley, Bernadette Lake. Press secretary, comms director, legislative director, caseworker. All on both payrolls.
The recount that never ended
The 2022 recount was certified on December 12, 2022. The campaign spent $249,329 out of its recount account. $63,217 of that is dated after December 31, 2022. The $15,000 to Jasmine Higgs for recount oversight is dated May 8, 2023. Raven Finegan and McKenna Farley each got $7,500 for recount oversight on March 29, 2023. Rock Chalk Media got $48,250 out of the recount account for digital advertising.
There was nothing to oversee in May 2023. The recount had been over for five months. Those are bonuses with a label on them.
The question I keep asking
I want to be precise here, because her lawyers read everything I write. The filings do not show a dollar going from any of these people back into Lauren Boebert’s pocket. They show a congresswoman who runs her campaign like a family business: the staff get paid twice, the candidate’s personal bills get paid once and corrected later, and the biggest checks go to vendors nobody has heard of for services nobody can describe.
So I will ask it as a question. When a chief of staff making $190,000 a year of public money gets a $28,000 “consulting” check from the boss’s campaign six days before Christmas, and the boss is a woman who has had tax liens, a foreclosure, a bankruptcy and a husband who could not keep a job, what is that money for? When a part-time House employee gets $15,000 to oversee a recount that ended five months earlier, who decided she had earned it, and what did she do with it?
I do not know the answer. I seriously wonder. I’ve heard rumors she’s allegedly demanding kick-backs. But that is unconfirmed.
And the people who do know are the same people cashing the checks.
What happens next
I have my anti-SLAPP case pending before the Weld County Courts. Boebert’s lawyer is due to file a response to our Motion by October 22nd after one extension was granted. We’ll see where that case goes.
If the FEC actually did it’s job, I would file another complaint about Boebert’s payments. But they’re pretty toothless right now and don’t even have enough members to convene a hearing or rule on complaints.
I’m hoping some former staffer, friend or family member that’s received a check will come forward and go on the record or file a whistleblower case and receive immunity from prosecution. The truth will eventually come out, in my experience in politics and with bad bosses like Boebert.
Every row referenced here comes from the FEC’s own electronic filing system and the House Statement of Disbursements. A six-page sources and methods report, with every total, the staff table, and the FEC filing number for each transaction named above, is embedded below so you can check the work yourself. The full dataset, all 80,231 receipts and 4,149 disbursements, is going into the VoteROI database and will be published. If you worked in that office, or for that campaign, or you know who runs Code Red Communications, I would like to hear from you. Background or off the record is fine.
News tips: david@americanmuckrakers.com
DBW
About the Author
David B. Wheeler is the president and co-founder of American Muckrakers, the Western North Carolina accountability organization best known for helping end Madison Cawthorn’s congressional career in 2022, the rare instance in modern politics of a sitting incumbent losing his own primary because somebody bothered to do the homework. Since then, American Muckrakers has turned its attention to Beetlejuice Boebert, Ken $$ Paxton, Mark (Nudeafrica.com) Robinson, Bymoron Donalds, Chunk Give Me Some Lovin Edwards, and a growing roster of politicians who confuse service in public office with a personal ATM. He publishes accountability journalism at Muckrakers.Today.
Wheeler co-hosts the MUCK YOU! podcast with Col. Moe Davis, the retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. He is the author of Color the Crooks, Case File #001: Lauren Boebert, the coloring book James Carville endorsed with the words “She earned every damn page. Buy it.” *He is also the founder of VoteROI.com, a political data company built on 86.9 million FEC records that helps donors figure out where their money actually goes, which, as this essay makes clear, is a question more people should be asking.
Wheeler has also recently started a competitor to ActBlue, VOTEROI, and an election prediction product that does not use polling: DATUM SIGNALS
Before all that, Wheeler spent three decades in politics, elections, and event production in more than 50 countries on all seven continents. Along the way he lowered the Mississippi River, produced the first professional sports event ever held in Moscow, and produced the first marathon ever run on Antarctica. His political education started early: Page for the Iowa House of Representatives, intern in the United States Senate, and National Committeeman for Iowa on the Young Democrats of America national committee. David was the lead advance guy for then Senator Obama in Iowa City, Iowa, in October of 2006, and then again during his presidential announcement in Waterloo, Iowa, in February 2007. And, he has some good stories from both experiences.
An Iowa native and proud Hawkeye, Wheeler is a father of three and lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina, in the district Chuck Edwards is currently failing. He believes sunlight is the best disinfectant, filings don’t lie, and the loudest guy in the room is usually the one with the most to hide. David grew up with a mother and father that agreed that “God is coming back. And, she is pissed.” That about says it all.
And, Beetlejuice Boebert claimed she was going to sue him for defamation. She never did, so David sued her in Federal Court in Denver and partially won.
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Yeah, well….Colorado hired her and despite the fact that she is an awful person and has done nothing for the people who voted her in, has kept her. Perhaps they don't have GED's either ……
I had the pleasure of Boebert
as my Rep for 4 years and I never understood why oil and gas big money supported her and how she got reelected in another district in CO. It took her 3 tries to get her GED. And it certainly isn't her
charming personality or her good looks. At least she stopped wearing that gun she had strapped on her ass. Wanted to wear it in the Chamber when she first got there. 😳