Secret, Foreign Money Floods Into Obama Campaign

The article below was written by Kenneth Timmerman, President and director of the Middle East Data Project. He has authored a number of books including Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown in Iran. For his work in exposing the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear weapons program, he was nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Timmerman is also a member of the Board of Advisors of our sister organization, American Congress for Truth.

Timmerman's article reveals extremely disturbing evidence that foreign nationals from the Muslim world are trying to influence our presidential election through illegal contributions to the Barack Obama campaign. We're not talking a few dollars here. As Timmerman notes, the Federal Election Commission has compiled a list of questionable foreign contributions totaling nearly $34,000,000! We urge you to read the entire article.

The "mainstream media" has virtually ignored this issue, in spite of the many, many news reports coming out of the Middle East and Muslim world that document the strong support Barack Obama has there. On WABC radio, April 13, 2008, Ahmed Yousef, political advisor for the Hamas terrorist organization, said "We like Mr. Obama and hope that he will win the election..." There have been reports that Hamas was running phone banks into the U.S. during the Democratic nomination campaign urging American Muslims to vote for Obama.

It's bad enough that billions in Saudi money have been spent to set up Middle East studies programs on American college campuses that indoctrinate students in a whitewashed, sanitized version of Islam that covers up its violent history and the supremacist doctrines of political Islam.

Have we reached a point where petro-dollars in the hands of Muslim foreign nationals are trying to buy a presidential election as well? Whether one supports Obama or McCain is not the issue. If there's evidence of massive amounts of foreign contributions to McCain, we'll report that.

The issue is we are Americans first, and the prospect of foreign nationals trying to illegally influence our election process should be something that every American should oppose and want exposed, regardless of political party affiliation or candidate preference.


Secret, Foreign Money Floods Into Obama Campaign

Monday, September 29, 2008, By: Kenneth R. Timmerman

More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won't disclose.

And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as legitimate.

Obama has raised nearly twice that of John McCain's campaign, according to new campaign finance report.

But because of Obama's high expenses during the hotly contested Democratic primary season and an early decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits it imposes, all that cash has not translated into a financial advantage -- at least, not yet.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee began September with $95 million in cash, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

The McCain camp and the Republican National Committee had $94 million, because of an influx of $84 million in public money.

But Obama easily could outpace McCain by $50 million to $100 million or more in new donations before Election Day, thanks to a legion of small contributors whose names and addresses have been kept secret.

Unlike the McCain campaign, which has made its complete donor database available online, the Obama campaign has not identified donors for nearly half the amount he has raised, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).

Federal law does not require the campaigns to identify donors who give less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them once they go beyond the $200 mark.

Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200 threshold.

"Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not listed," said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. "They don't appear anywhere, so there's no way of knowing who they are."

The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified.

It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002.

Biersack would not comment on whether the FEC was investigating the huge amount of cash that has come into Obama's coffers with no public reporting.

But Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for CRP, a campaign-finance watchdog group, dismissed the scale of the unreported money.

"We feel comfortable that it isn't the $20 donations that are corrupting a campaign," he told Newsmax.

But those small donations have added up to more than $200 million, all of it from unknown and unreported donors.

Ritsch acknowledges that there is skepticism about all the unreported money, especially in the Obama campaign coffers.

"We and seven other watchdog groups asked both campaigns for more information on small donors," he said. "The Obama campaign never responded," whereas the McCain campaign "makes all its donor information, including the small donors, available online."

The rise of the Internet as a campaign funding tool raises new questions about the adequacy of FEC requirements on disclosure. In pre-Internet fundraising, almost all political donations, even small ones, were made by bank check, leaving a paper trail and limiting the amount of fraud.

But credit cards used to make donations on the Internet have allowed for far more abuse.

"While FEC practice is to do a post-election review of all presidential campaigns, given their sluggish metabolism, results can take three or four years," said Ken Boehm, the chairman of the conservative National Legal and Policy Center.

Already, the FEC has noted unusual patterns in Obama campaign donations among donors who have been disclosed because they have gone beyond the $200 minimum.

(To continue reading this article and the information on foreign donations, click here)



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