Saturday, October 25, 2008

Obama's Criminal Fundraising Machine

I published an in-depth background analysis on this year's collapse of the post-1974 campaign finance regime at Pajamas Media yesterday, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud."

It turns out that not only has Barack Obama
violated his pledge to fund his campaign with public money, new revelations also indicate he's now running one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in American history:

As Scott Mirengoff at Powerline reported on Thursday, the Obama campaign refuses to screen credit card contributions for potential fraudulent transactions, and thus any individual could make unlimited contributions using infinite aliases.

It turns out, for example, that credit card companies deploy a variety of security measures to guarantee the processing of electronic transactions. For campaign giving, the key safeguards are vendor address verification, country of residence, and proof of citizenship. We now know that Obama operatives at the campaign’s website have disabled the security settings on vendor identity to expedite online donations, gifts that then speed through to fund election activities that would be flagged as illegal under normal FEC reporting standards.

Allapundit at Hot Air has shown that, as the news of Obama’s open-access credit card procedures went viral across the conservative blogosphere, readers conducted dozens of “experiments” to see if the Obama campaign would accept their money. In no time, the Obama campaign was accepting money from the likes of “JarackBoe BOamabiden” and “Nodda Realperson.” It’s unlikely that these donations will be flagged as fraudulent once the original credit card transactions clear. Thus, while amassing its illegal campaign-contributions war chest, the Obama campaign brazenly flouts the federal election regulations enacted during an earlier reform era of “hope and change.” Meanwhile, the pro-Obama liberal press looks the other way, partnering with the very corruption and duplicity the media industry has attacked during eight years of Republican power in Washington.

Make no mistake, the Democratic nominee may now be running the biggest underground finance operation since President Nixon deployed the “plumbers” as his key operatives for
CREEP in 1972.
After a week of reporting across the conservative blogosphere, the mainstream press still refuses to investigate the story.

As
Hindrocket notes:

Maybe after the campaign is safely over someone will be interested enough to find out how much of Obama's record campaign fundraising was criminal. Ten percent? Twenty? Fifty? On some other planet, with different reporters and editors, one might expect this to be a significant news story. Of course, in the world we live in, our reporters are too busy covering Sarah Palin's shoes and hair stylist to have time to notice that Barack Obama's entire campaign may be based on a foundation of criminal fraud.
See also, "Obama Campaign Runs Afoul of Finance Rules."

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