In September, the Obama campaign got 1.8 million donations from small
contributors who did not break the $200 threshold requiring that their
information be reported to the Federal Election Commission. They gave
the campaign 98 percent of the $181 million it raised that month, a
figure vastly higher than its take in any previous month.
Is the
Obama campaign financing itself through foreign money funneled in
through a website owned by a private businessman, living in China, that
uses the name Obama.com?
In 1997, we learned — too late — that the Clinton campaign had relied
heavily on thinly disguised Chinese government money for much of its
early blitz of issue ads in the 1996 election. The early intimations of
funding fraud in the campaign (Al Gore’s exploits with the Buddhist
monks) shaved off half of Clinton’s margin, cutting his lead from 14 to 7
points in the weeks before the election. But the full dimensions of the
scandal were not apparent until then-Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) held
hearings the following year revealing the depth of the campaign’s
reliance on foreign money.
Now, in the last month of the 2012
race, Newsweek magazine has raised serious questions about Obama’s
fundraising and its possible reliance on foreign donors and outright
fraud to generate its funding.
Newsweek raises questions, in
particular, about Robert W. Roche, the co-founder and chairman of the
board of Acorn International Inc., a media and branding direct-sales
company based in Shanghai. He also owns the Obama.com website, which
appears on the Internet throughout the world. Roche’s site links to
Barackobama.com, the official campaign site, where it invites people to
donate to the campaign. Obama.com gets 2,000 visits a day, two-thirds of
which are from foreigners. Is it a giant money-laundering operation to
feed foreign money into the Obama campaign?
Despite the disclaimer
on the campaign site stating that foreign nationals cannot donate to
Obama, the suspicion remains that Roche’s vigilance in assuring that
Obama.com is on the Internet throughout the world has led to a
significant influx of foreign cash into the coffers of the president’s
reelection effort.
It will be too late to wait until 2013 to find
out. The House Oversight Committee should immediately investigate, using
its subpoena power, to see if there is, indeed, a flow of foreign
money, via Obama.com, into the president’s campaign.
Roche, by the way, has visited the White House 11 times during Obama’s tenure, according to the visitor log.
These
questions arise because the Obama campaign, unlike Romney’s or, for
that matter, Hillary Clinton’s in 2008, refuses to ask donors for their
CVV number (the number on your credit card that one is often asked for
after giving one’s name and expiration date). The CVV is designed to
assure that the donor is actually physically holding the card.
The
Obama campaign is no stranger to fraudulent donations funneled in
through phony names. In 2008, The Washington Post reported that Mary
Biskup was reported to have donated more than $170,000 to the Obama
campaign in small donations. But Biskup says she never gave any money to
the campaign. Some other donor must have given the money in her name.
Given
these past problems and the Obama campaign’s sudden influx of small
donors, Newsweek wonders why the campaign does not require CVV numbers
to minimize the chances of fraud.
The magazine noted that the
campaign’s past scandals “make it all the more surprising that the Obama
campaign does not use … the card verification value [system].” The
magazine added that “the Romney campaign, by contrast, does use the CVV —
as has almost every other candidate who has run for president in recent
years.”
Let’s find out the facts before the election. If a
president who promised ethical transparency is using small donations —
too small to trigger the federal reporting requirement — to funnel in
foreign donations, we need to know. Before Election Day.
