Obama and Campaign Finance Fraud

These stories just keep piling up so I thought it was time to round them up a little so a more complete story was readily available. First up is this Newsmax story:

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.

The main suspicious characteristic of these donations is as follows.

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.

Jack Kelly, a reporter for the Toledo Blade newspaper, also writes on this less than two hundred dollar pattern.

WHO is "Will, Good"?

Mr. Good Will - who lists his employer as "Loving" and his profession as "You" - has contributed 1,000 times to the Barack Obama campaign.

All the contributions have been in amounts of $25 or less. But they add up to $17,375 - far more than the legal limit of $4,600. That's $2,300 each for the primary and general election campaigns.

This loophole in the donation laws seems primed for abuse.

Making contributions on credit cards via the Internet - as both Good Will and Doodad Pro did - makes it easier for foreigners to contribute. Web logger Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) reported three Palestinians living in a refugee camp in Gaza tried to donate $33,500 to the Obama campaign last year. They were caught only because the amount was far above the legal limit. If foreigners donate in amounts less than $200, their illegal involvement would be virtually undetectable.

But it gets worse. Obama's campaign claims to have returned these illegal donations from Palestine. Powerline links to a online investigation by Pamela Gellar that shows these donations were never returned. Scott at Powerline adds:

Among the donors Geller identified this past July, for example, was this fellow:

Name: Hbkjb, jkbkj

City: Jkbjnj

Works for: Kuman Bank [doesn't exist]

Occupation: Balanon Jalalan

Amount: $1,077.23

Only the money, of course, is real.

Will anything be done? Will this be investigated? If it were up to the mainstream media, these investigations would never happen. At the very least, they won't happen until after the election and their choice for President is safely elected. Glenn Reynolds writes something encouraging, however.

I JUST GOT THIS EMAIL: "Republican National Committee (RNC) Chief Counsel Sean Cairncross will announce today a complaint that the RNC is filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against the Obama campaign. The complaint will address foreign national and excessive contributions accepted by the Obama campaign that demonstrate it is operating outside of federal campaign finance law."

As for whether anything will come from this investigation, I have serious doubts. It is possible that it could become a damaging news story but given the medias bias, I'm sure it will be spun as racism on the part of McCain for questioning the donations in the first place.