Monday, October 20, 2008

Obama's Campaign Money: How Much is Illegal?

The guy's done well for campaign contributions.

Exceptionally well.

Amazingly, extraordinarily, well.

But there are telltale signs that the money's not necessarily legal. One big sign is "un-rounded amounts."

Newsmax found an astonishing 37,265 unique donors to the Obama campaign whose contributions were not rounded up to dollar amounts. That amounts to more than 10 percent of the total number of unique donors whose names have been disclosed by the Obama campaign to the public.

Of those, 44,410 contributions came in unrounded amounts of less than $100. FEC regulations only require that campaigns disclose the names of donors who have given a total of $200 or more, so that means that all these contributors were repeat donors
.

So what?

One expert in campaign finance irregularities offers a possible explanation.

“Of course this is odd. They are obviously converting from local currency to U.S. dollars,” said Ken Boehm, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center


There are other tells in the campaign records.

The Obama camp claims to have 2.5 million donors in all. But until now, they have kept secret the names of the overwhelming majority of these money-givers. According to a Newsmax analysis, the Obama campaign finance records contain just 370,448 unique names.

Even accounting for common names such as Robert Taylor or Michael Brown, which can signify multiple donors, Obama’s publicly known donor base is less than 20 percent of the total number of donors the campaign claims to have attracted. But the identity of the other 2 million donors is being kept secret.


As of the end of August, those secret donors have given an incredible $222.7 million to Obama, according to the FEC -- money whose origin remains unknown to anyone other than Obama’s finance team, who won’t take calls from the press


---that is to say, the press which actually has an interest--

Hillary shoulda stuck around Chicago for a longer time. She coulda learned how to do this.

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