Republican Party Files Complaint Against Obama For Illegal Fundraising

From WaPo

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee today said the party will ask the Federal Election Commission to look into the source of thousands of small-dollar contributions to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.

The RNC is alleging that the Obama campaign was so hungry for donations it “looked the other way” as contributions piled up from suspicious, and possibly even illegal foreign donors….

Cairncross alleged there was mounting evidence of this, and cited a report in the current issue of Newsweek magazine that documents a handful of instances where donors made repeated small donations using fake names, such as “Good Will” and “Doodad Pro.”

The Newsweek report says that earlier this year the Obama campaign returned $33,000 to two Palestinian brothers in the Gaza Strip who had bought T-shirts in bulk from the campaign’s online store — purchases that count as campaign contributions. The brothers had listed their address as “Ga.,” which the campaign took to mean Georgia rather than Gaza….

At the heart of the RNC complaint is a federal fundraising rule that lets campaigns accept donations under $200 without itemizing the names and addresses of the donors on its campaign finance reports. The rule was intended as a matter of practicality — it did not seem reasonable to ask a campaign to gather that information from every five-dollar donor.

But the Obama campaign has raised more than $200 million this way, a staggering sum for donations that will not be subjected to outside scrutiny.

There have been several articles about this on the JustSayNoDeal blogs for a good while now, and I am happy to hear that the RNC has decided to take action…

The responses and statements out of the Obama camp on how diligent they really are about ensuring the legitimacy…  The details of the Nigerian scheme from the BBC

Nigerian anti-graft investigators have seized money raised by the head of the Nigerian Stock Exchange to support US presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The EFCC said it had seized 74m naira ($630,000, £314,000)….

US political parties are not allowed to receive contributions from abroad….

The money was going to be spent on adverts encouraging Nigerians in the US to vote for Mr Obama….

“We paid for the hall and the entertainers and the surplus, we said would be spent on advertisements aimed at persuading Nigerians to tell their relatives in America to register to vote.

“There is not one Nigerian who doesn’t have a relative or friend in America. Our aim was to encourage those people to tell their family who have the right to vote in America to vote for Obama.”

Super…  essentially foreign 527’s running campaign ads in the US…  Love that.

And from Newsmax comes the story of Will, Good and Pro, Doodad…  who both work for “Loving You.”

More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won’t disclose.

Unlike the McCain campaign, which has made its complete donor database available online, the Obama campaign has not identified donors for nearly half the amount he has raised, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP)…  Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200 threshold.

“Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not listed,” said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. “They don’t appear anywhere, so there’s no way of knowing who they are….”

The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified….

A Newsmax analysis of the 1.4 million individual contributions in the latest master file for the Obama campaign discovered 1,000 separate entries for Mr. Good Will, most of them for $25.

Mr. Good Will listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You…”  In total, Mr. Good Will gave $17,375.

Similarly, a donor identified as “Pro, Doodad,” from “Nando, NY,” gave $19,500 in 786 separate donations, most of them for $25. For most of these donations, Mr. Doodad Pro listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You,” just as Good Will had done….  Doodad’s cumulative contributions since the beginning of the campaign were $10,965.

Then there are the foreigners contributing to Obama…  Also From Newsmax

The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation for Iran. Another 63 listed it as “UK,” the United Kingdom.

More than 1,400 of the overseas entries clearly were U.S. diplomats or military personnel, who gave an APO address overseas. Their total contributions came to just $201,680.

But others came from places as far afield as Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Beijing, Fallujah, Florence, Italy, and a wide selection of towns and cities in France….

A pair of Palestinian brothers named Hosam and Monir Edwan contributed more than $31,300 to the Obama campaign in October and November 2007, FEC records show.

The indication is that nearly HALF of the money Obama has raised could be tainted…  that sure would explain his incredible record breaking fundraising month after month, wouldn’t it?

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