X/@TimcastNews
Former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz claimed on Wednesday that he and other members of Congress had to wear “demoralizing” QR codes at an American Israeli Public Affairs Committee reception so donors could “scan you like a can of tomato soup.”
Discussing his recent criticism of pro-Israel lobbying organizations like AIPAC during an appearance on Tim Pool’s podcast Timcast, Gaetz recalled:
I saw the way AIPAC worked and that was weird for like a country lawyer like me. I remember my first AIPAC reception, and like your fundraiser tells you you have to go, and your chief of staff tells you you have to go, your committee chairmen all tell you you have to go.
You get there and you wear this name badge and I remember there’s a QR code on it, and what we were supposed to do was go talk to donors, and then if they liked you, they scanned your QR code to make a donation, like on the spot. Can you just imagine how demoralizing that is? To like be told that your job for the next several hours is to go chat people up hoping they would scan you like a can of tomato soup on the way out of the meeting?
He continued, “So I saw that and I was like, ‘That is so freaking weird,’ and then, you know, I was in Israel. I went multiple times and I did not like the fact that I found someone in my room rooting around in my stuff. They should not have been there, it’s King David Hotel. When I came back to my room, no one was expecting me to be back in my room– I don’t know who it was, I just thought like, this is weird.”
Gaetz concluded, “All of these things combined are odd and then the policy outgrowth seems to be an obsession about the Middle East that has not served my generation well.”
AIPAC denied Gaetz’s claim in a social media post, writing, “The accusation about our fundraisers is, of course, a lie. Barcodes are on name badges for security reasons, not fundraising, and are scanned for that purpose. Maybe @mattgaetz was confused because he wanted people to scan his barcode, and they didn’t even want to talk to him.”
The post Matt Gaetz Says Members of Congress Had to Wear ‘Demoralizing’ QR Codes For AIPAC Donors to Scan ‘Like a Can of Tomato Soup’ first appeared on Mediaite.
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