Obama’s Questionable Internet Donations Raise Suspicion at WaPo

Yesterday John McCain made this statement regarding Senator Obama’s infomercial which aired via his multi-million dollar ad buy on CBS, NBC, FOX, UNIVISION, MSNBC, and NY1:

“When you’re watching this gauzy, feel-good commercial, just remember that it was paid for with broken promises. Senator Obama signed a piece of paper committing to public financing of his campaign.

Twice he looked the American people in the eye and said he would sit down with me before he abandoned public financing.

He didn’t mean a word of it.

When it was in his interest to break his promise, he tossed it aside like it didn’t mean a thing.

He is the first candidate since Watergate to abandon the public financing system, and his campaign is now being flooded with hundreds of millions of dollars in undisclosed and questionable donations.”

This smacks of a man trying to buy the Presidency. Obama’s campaign has spent one billion dollars.

Are his supporters really foolish enough to believe that this outrageous amount of money came from small donations over the internet? Apparently so.

Someone named ‘Marie’ on the Nielsen website wrote the following:

“Obama’s money comes from small contributions donated mainly through the internet by regular people who choose to donate. If he chooses to spend it on an infomercial then he’s spending it on behalf of his supporters. It has therefore nothing to do with a corrupt government or ‘buying the election’.”

I almost fell off my chair at the naïveté and ignorance of this statement.

Barack Obama has received more Wall Street money than any other candidate. He has received more Fannie/Freddie lobbying money than anyone in the Senate, save Senator Chris Dodd (D), Chair of the Senate Banking Committee. To use one of Senator Obama’s favorite phrases, ‘the notion that’ his base, without the help of a bunch of millionaires or billionaires, would have the kind of money required, and would be so inclined to donate a billion dollars on their own in this horrible economy, is preposterous.

Even Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Obama [Is] Accepting Untraceable Donations:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

But at the rate he is spending it, he could not afford to scrutinize these donations – surely he cannot afford to return any of that money. It is long gone.

The Obama organization said its extensive review has ensured that the campaign has refunded any improper contributions, and noted that Federal Election Commission rules do not require front-end screening of donations.

They have refunded the donations? How would we know? How would the FEC know? Perhaps he has returned a few, but read on and see that it is highly doubtful that this problem has been solved. Government agencies seem reluctant to question him about much of anything.

In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama’s accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama’s finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.

The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.
…
The Obama campaign has shattered presidential fundraising records, in part by capitalizing on the ease of online giving. Of the $150 million the senator from Illinois raised in September, nearly $100 million came in over the Internet.

Consider:

…[T]he case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama’s FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.

Biskup, who had scores of Obama contributions attributed to her, said in an interview that she never donated to the candidate. “That’s an error,” she said. Moreover, she added, her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made the contributions with another card.

There is nothing in this story stating whether that $174,800 was refunded to the phony donors and rejected. This is horrifying. And here is the Obama campaign’s cavalier response:

When asked whether the campaign takes steps to verify whether a donor’s name matches the name on the credit card used to make a payment, Obama’s campaign replied in an e-mail: “Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this.

Surely, you must be joking. Uppity Woman posted an excellent story, My Contributions to the Obama Campaign Under Fictitious Names Sunday night, complete with screenshots of Obama’s donation page.

It was possible for her to make donations under the names Bill Ayers, Osama bin Laden, John Galt and Saddam Hussein under the same credit card – and the charges went through. Attempts to do the same on both Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s donation pages were rejected.

R. Rebecca Donatelli, who handles online contributions for the McCain operation and the RNC, said security measures have been standard in the GOP nominee’s fundraising efforts throughout the campaign. She said she was “flabbergasted” to learn that the Obama campaign accepts prepaid cards.
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“They have opened the floodgates to all this money coming in,” said Sean Cairncross, chief counsel to the Republican National Committee. “I think they’ve made the determination that whatever money they have to refund on the back end doesn’t outweigh the benefit of taking all this money upfront.”

How can anyone determine the source of these donations – and since he has all but spent it all, with outrageous ad buys like the one last night, how is he ever going to give it back if these donations were found to be fraudulent?

Answer – he’s not.

No one would begrudge anyone their fundraising prowess, but something does not pass the smell test. He has outspent John McCain six to one and yet this is very much a tied horse race, no matter how much the cooked polls pretend otherwise.

Does anyone really think that if Obama had kept his word and accepted public financing, subjecting his campaign to a level playing field, he would still be in this race? Makes one wonder. Obviously, Senator Obama and his campaign manager, David Axelrod, must not have had much confidence in his chances either – otherwise he would not have gone back on his word in order to super-size his way into the Presidency.

Let us hope the voters are not fooled.