X/@TimcastNews
Former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz He claimed Wednesday that he and other members of Congress had to use “demoralizing” QR codes at an Israeli-American Public Affairs Committee reception so donors could “scan it like a can of tomato soup.”
Discussing his recent criticism of pro-Israel lobbying organizations like AIPAC during an appearance on Tim pool podcast time transmissionGaetz recalled:
I saw the way AIPAC worked and that was strange for a rural lawyer like me. I remember my first AIPAC reception, and just as your fundraiser tells you you have to go, and your chief of staff tells you you have to go, all your committee chairs tell you you have to go.
You get there and you wear this badge with your name on it and I remember it has a QR code on it, and what we were supposed to do was go talk to the donors, and then if they liked you, they would scan your QR code to make a donation, like on the spot. Can you imagine how demoralizing that is? Do you like being told that your job for the next few hours is to chat with people in the hope that they’ll scan you like a can of tomato soup on the way out of the meeting?
He continued: “So I saw that and I thought, ‘That’s very strange,’ and then, you know, I was in Israel. I went several times and I didn’t like the fact that I found someone in my room going through my things. They shouldn’t have been there, it’s the King David Hotel. When I went back to my room, no one expected me to come back to my room; I don’t know who it was, I just thought, this is strange.”
Gaetz concluded: “All of these things combined are strange and then the political consequence 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 allegation about our fundraising activities is, of course, a lie. The barcodes are on the ID cards 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.”
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