Alex Joyner ran Matt Van Epps's campaign for Congress. After Van Epps won the special election for Tennessee's 7th District in December 2025, his congressional office announced Joyner as a senior adviser — a job paid by taxpayers.
On October 5, 2026, Van Epps's Democratic opponent, Darden Copeland, filed an ethics complaint asking the Office of Congressional Conduct to look at what happened next. FOX 17 reported the complaint on October 7. It alleges Joyner kept managing the campaign while drawing a House salary.
Van Epps's office calls the complaint "a political attack from a partisan operative." So we checked the part of it that anyone can check.
The campaign never stopped paying him
The complaint says Joyner was paid by both the House and the Van Epps campaign from January through June 2026: $61,805.58 from the House, and $12,493.91 from the campaign.
The campaign half is public. Van Epps's own reports to the Federal Election Commission list a "PAYROLL" payment to Alex Joyner every two weeks, from January 14 through June 17. Those twelve payments add up to exactly $12,493.91 — the figure in the complaint, to the penny.
It didn't stop in June. The FEC records show two more payroll checks in July, and on July 16, a $10,000 payment to Joyner for "political strategy consulting."
So the man on Van Epps's taxpayer-funded staff was on the campaign's payroll for those same six months, and then some.
He was still being called the campaign manager in September
This isn't only about paperwork. On September 20, FOX 17 ran a story asking "Where is Matt Van Epps?" — because, as it reported, Van Epps had been "noticeably quiet" while his opponent campaigned across the district. In that story, FOX 17 reported that a Nashville Republican activist had spoken with "Van Epps campaign manager Alex Joyner" about the campaign's plans for an eight-county bus tour.
Copeland's complaint cites that report. It also alleges Joyner may have worked on other Tennessee races while on the House payroll, pointing to social media posts from Williamson County Mayor Andy Marshall that feature him, and it raises questions about travel reimbursements Joyner got from taxpayer funds. It asks the Office of Congressional Conduct to subpoena Joyner's phone records, texts and emails to find out whether he did campaign work on the taxpayers' time.
According to the complaint, the House pay alone works out to roughly $123,600 a year.
What Van Epps says
Van Epps's office released this statement: "This complaint is misleading, factually unsupported, and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the law. It is a political attack from a partisan operative, not a serious ethics complaint."
The statement doesn't say Joyner stopped working on the campaign. It doesn't explain the $10,000 consulting payment. And it doesn't deny that a man described as the campaign manager in September was on the House payroll at the same time.
The Office of Congressional Conduct has not said whether it will open an investigation.
Who Van Epps works for
Van Epps has been in Congress less than a year, and the money questions keep coming. Outside groups funded by billionaires spent more electing him than he raised himself. And after two CoreCivic CEOs wrote him checks, he became one of Congress's loudest voices for funding ICE — the agency CoreCivic profits from: it runs an ICE detention facility in West Tennessee.
What the filings show
Matt Van Epps moved his campaign manager, Alex Joyner, onto his taxpayer-funded House staff, where an ethics complaint says Joyner earned $61,805.58 from January through June. Van Epps's own FEC reports show his campaign paid Joyner every two weeks over the same months — $12,493.91 — then $10,000 more for "political strategy consulting" in July, and FOX 17 was still identifying Joyner as the campaign manager in September.
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