Charlie Gibson, Will You Ask Barack About Nadhmi Auchi? [Update Re Tonight's Debate]

Serious question: how do you pronounce “Auchi”?

I hear Charlie’s a sweetheart to work with.
Let’s hope he does our bidding!

Obie’s booing peanut gallery will be there tonight so he can make another commercial that looks like it was impromptu.

Nope…..they will toss him softballs. I do expect something special before the voting from the Clintons.

Boy, he is cocky isn’t he? I wonder if he’ll get all the credit for setting back the Democratic Party 100 years. I know I’ve changed my political affiliation here if Florida to NPR (no political affiliation), I used to vote a straight ticket. No longer. I feel pretty dumb for supporting Dean and Kerry after all. I wouldn’t have voted for George Bush. I just wouldn’t have voted at all. Thats what I’m going to do if Obama is the candidate. I couldn’t beleive it when Bush won a second term, but now I understand why people are against the Democrats in so many ways anyway. I thought they really represented the little guy.

The Times of London follows the money in the journalistic tradition of Watergate and finds a strange connection between Tony Rezko, Barack Obama, and Nadhmi Auchi.

The latter, one of Britain’s richest men, has a long history of shady financial dealings as well as numerous connections to Saddam Hussein, who he helped to power.

According to the Times, Auchi sent a lot of money to Rezko just before his wife bought property adjacent to the Obamas in a land deal that has already raised a lot of eyebrows:

A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama’s fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.

The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi, one of Britain’s wealthiest men, helped Mr Obama buy his mock Georgian mansion in Chicago.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama’s bagman Antoin “Tony” Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

Three weeks later, Mr Obama bought a house on the city’s South Side while Mr Rezko’s wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.

Why is this important to the land deal?
Mrs Rezko paid the asking price for the garden but the Obamas bought the house for $1.65 million, – $300,000 less than the asking price. The sellers deny they offered the Obamas a discount on the house because the garden had fetched full price from Mrs Rezko.

They took 15% less than the asking price? That’s a rather remarkable discount. And how exactly did the Rezkos afford to buy the adjacent plot? It cost $625,000, and they needed to make a $125,000 down payment on the land. Yet at the time, Tony Rezko had “no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets, no unencumbered assets [and] is significantly in arrears on many of his obligations” — according to a sworn court statement a year later. His wife had an income of $37,000 and assets of around $35,000.

How could they qualify for a mortgage on the adjacent plot? Where did they get the money for the down payment? More importantly, why did Auchi lend so much money to Rezko, when Rezko had been in such financial straits? And why was Auchi so interested in Rezko in the first place?

Let’s take another look at Auchi:
Auchi’s brother was among the many Baathists killed by Saddam, but the execution did not inhibit Auchi’s business dealings with Iraq which, he says, didn’t stop until the Gulf war of 1991. His first coup in the West was to broker a deal to sell Italian frigates to the Iraqi Defence Ministry, for which he received $17m in commission. Italian investigators claimed that a Panamanian company owned by Auchi was used to funnel allegedly illegal payments. Auchi denied he had done anything wrong.

In the mid-1980s he got to know Pierfrancesco Pacini Battaglia, a man whose role in directing money to politicians led Italians to call him ‘the one below God’. Saddam Hussein had ordered the construction of a pipeline from Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Battaglia and Auchi secured the contract for a Franco-Italian consortium. In a statement to New York lawyers Battaglia alleged he knew how. ‘To acquire the contract it was necessary, as is usual, especially in Middle Eastern countries, to pay commission to characters close to the Iraqi government… In this case, the international intermediary who dealt with this matter was the Iraqi, Nadhmi Auchi.’ Auchi has denied any wrong-doing.

Nick Cohen suggests that Britain only extradited Auchi to France to face fraud charges in 2003 because our invasion of Iraq had ended his usefulness as an expert on the Hussein regime for MI-6. In any case, Auchi also allegedly had a hand in defrauding the UK’s National Health System after his fleecing of the French oil company Elf.

It’s probable that other revelations are yet to come that will show Obama to be just another machine politician, skirting the edge of ethics and the law – perhaps even going over the line and engaging in criminal activities.

Obama is not the Agent of Change. He is a calculating politician who plays the game the same way politicians have been playing it for hundreds of years – receiving money in exchange for favors from government for his friends and cronies, the influence selling, the sweetheart deals, and all the rest of this sleazy mess.

There seems to be a lot more to Rezko than just slumlording. When a figure like Auchi gives a low-rent figure like Rezko that kind of money, he’s not looking to expand tenement ownership.

I am glad that this subject of fuzzy memory of Sen. Barack Obama is up agaian.

Repeat after me- the media wants Obama, they will not tell the truth. It is OUR JOB to do that!!!!

The media is a big ole giant spiderweb and Obama is Pennywise the clown, sucking little children in with his mask and then wrapping them up in silk while sucking them dry!
Illusion- all illusion!
The media is nothing more than a big special interest and we know they want a pres favorable to big business. Obama/McCain either way they get what they want.

Barack HUSSEIN Obama? You’re cribbing from Ann Coulter? Really? I mean I realize this is his middle name, but…. really? You have to go there?

I have certainly read some fair criticisms of Obama here, but you guys have convinced yourself your hatred of Obama is rational, therefore anything goes. Racism, Islamophobia, whatever it takes to take him down. Here’s a tip: you seriously, SERIOUSLY detract from your fair criticisms when you pollute them with this kind of garbage. Even Michelle Malkin draws the line at the “Hussein” crap.

What I’ve seen here is no more rational than that of the Hillary haters. You’re driven by the same mentality that makes people think it’s acceptable to call Hillary a bitch or a cunt. What’s wrong is wrong is wrong. If you want to criticize his policy, his honesty, his integrity, fine. But leave the racial stuff out of it.

I hope “American Idol” Result Night will take the Obamaniacs away from the ABC Presidential Debate, which airs the same time as the former.This Obamaniacs will just drool/applause their “lying idol” & if given the chance, will be rude, as their “false idol”, by booing the most qualified presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, for the sake of JUST being RUDE!!!
I DO NOT TRUST SENATOR BARACK OBAMA!!
VOTE HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT!!!

“Let me make one last point about the comparison to McGovern and Dukakis, both excellent men, but I’m a pretty darn good politician.

Glad you brought it up Barry. Their names DO come to mind. Guess what you have in common with both of them?

i want charlie gibson to ask obama about when he was on food stamps exactly. what year…….was it when you were indonesia ? i am not aware food stamps exist there. was it when he lived with his typical white grandmother, a vice president of a bank ? is he lying again ? maybe his granny can tell us when it was he fell on hard times and was just like us ? you know, just small town obama……excuse me, i am suddenly sick to my stomach…..