Attn MSM: Here’s Evidence of Foreign Campaign Donations

Posted by Jeff Dunetz Oct 12th 2010 at 8:08 am in CBS, Mainstream Media, New York Times, Obama, Politics, media bias

Folks who watched CBS “Face the Nation” yesterday were greeted by a once-in-a-lifetime miracle occurrence: host Bob Schieffer taking a contrary position to one of the Administration’s talking points. Talking to White House political director David Axelrod about the President’s charge that the Chamber of Commerce is using foreign donations to support GOP candidates, he asked:

SCHIEFFER: Now, I want to ask you about that because the New York Times looked into the Chamber specifically and said the Chamber really isn’t putting foreign money into the campaign.

That it does charge its foreign affiliates dues that bring in less than $100,000 a year. A lot of organizations, including labor unions, do that. But the Chamber has an annual budget of $200 million. Along with that it keeps these foreign dues separate. They do spend heavily in politics — $25 million so far. They expect to spend $50 million. But this part about foreign money, that appears to be peanuts, Mr. Axelrod. Do you have any evidence that it’s anything other than peanuts?

AXELROD: Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob? The fact is that the Chamber has asserted that but they won’t release any information about where their campaign money is coming from. That’s at the core of the problem here. What we’ve seen in part because of a loophole that the Supreme Court allowed earlier this year, we now see tens of millions of dollars being spent by the chamber and a number of organizations some of which just cropped up. Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove run one of them. Tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed donors under benign names like the American cross roads fund. They’re spending heavily in all of these elections. One race in Colorado, there are six different organizations running negative ads against the Democratic senator there, Michael Bennet. No one knows where the money is coming from. My question back to you and for your next guest is, why not simply disclose where this money is coming from? And then all of these questions will be answered.

In other words Axelrod and the Democratic Party pulled this charge out of nowhere, threw it against the wall and are praying it sticks, or as Schieffer said:

I guess I would put it this way. If the only charge three weeks into the election that the Democrats can make is that somehow this may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign, is that the best you can do?

The President is traveling the country campaigning for Democratic candidates and repeating the unsubstantiated lies:

“You can’t let it happen,” Mr. Obama told thousands of supporters gathered on a school lawn in a predominantly African-American, working-class neighborhood of northern Philadelphia. “Don’t let them hijack your agenda. The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their election and you can’t stand by and let the special interests drown out the voices of the American people.”
“You don’t know,” he said here. “It could be the oil industry; it could be the insurance industry; it could even be foreign-owned companies. You don’t know because they don’t have to disclose. Now that’s not just a threat to the Democrats; it’s a threat to democracy.”

Strong words for the President, especially when you consider that his 2008 campaign was riddled with foreign donations and other irregularities.

Beginning in mid-July 2008, blogger Pamela Geller went through publicly accessible FEC records and discovered foreign donors supporting the Obama effort. Geller’s investigations unveiled a series of donations to Obama made by Monir Edwan and Hosam Edwan (Palestinians born and raised in Gaza) totaling $29,521.54. A third brother, Yousef, reportedly gave the campaign about $4,000. After that particular donation was discovered by Geller, the WSJ followed up with the Obama campaign who claimed the donations were returned.  Not true, said the Palestinians. From reporter Aaron Klei:

“No, we did not receive any money back from the Obama campaign at any time,“said Monir Edwan.

Geller wrote a series of articles which were barely mentioned in the MSM except in pieces trashing her. Her research not only showed foreign contributors, but people who had contributed well over the $2,500 dollar limit, and contributors from the progressive media.

The investigation showed that Gaza wasn’t the President’s only source foreign dollars, his campaign accepted contributions came from over 50 nations. They tried to scam the system by having the  foreign contributors make multiple small donations, seemingly in their own names, over a period of a few days, while the individual donations were under maximum allowed, but the  aggregate were in excess of the maximums. Other donations came in from donors with fake names such as “Hbkjb,” “jkbkj,” and “Doodad.”

Thousands of Obama’s foreign donations ended in cents. This was evidence of foreign contributors sending in donations in foreign currencies that were exchanged into dollars resulting in odd amounts. Donations from Americans living overseas would more likely be in dollars so they wouldn’t have those “odd amounts.”

The Obama campaign received a substantial amount of money from countries that have an interest in seeing a weak American President: $366,708.22 from China, $25,259.00 from the United Arab Emirates, $7,062.60 from Russia, and $6,716.28 from Saudi Arabia. Obama also took in $6,350.00 from Indonesia, $5,000.00 from Kenya, and $1,750.00 from Egypt.

The records also indicate that Obama also took donations from Tamil Tiger leaders. The Tamil Tigers are, according to the FBI, the most successful terrorist group in the world. While the Hillary Clinton returned contributions from the Tamil Tigers, Obama kept them.

Two years after that election the mainstream media has yet to report on stories about President Obama’s foreign donations all verified by FEC documentation. Maybe it’s time for them to challenge the unsubstantiated administration rumors with the real evidence of foreign donations being used to influence an election, the election in 2008.

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