Stumble it!By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
A Newsmax investigation of Obama/Biden campaign contributors, undertaken in conjunction with a private investigative firm headed by a former CIA operations officer, has identified 118 donors who appear to lack U.S. citizenship.
Some of these “red flag” donors work for foreign governments; others have made public statements declaring that they are citizens of Cameroun, Nigeria, Pakistan, Canada, and other countries.
A Newsmax sampling of about 3,400 donors also found hundreds more who showed “yellow flags” such as not having used a Social Security number or a known U.S. address. Most U.S.-born citizens are issued Social Security numbers at birth or by the time they enter kindergarten.
Under federal law, only U.S. citizens or permanent residents may donate to federal political campaigns. It is illegal for the campaigns to accept money knowingly from foreign donors.
The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill of 2002 placed new restrictions on political fundraising after the scandals of 1996, when the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign was exposed for having taken millions of dollars of unregulated soft money from donors with ties to Chinese military intelligence.
But even with the new laws, it remains very difficult to identify with any precision foreign money if a campaign itself does not cooperate with the Federal Election Commission and perform its own due diligence.
Until very recently, the Obama campaign had no safeguards in its online fundraising Web site designed to weed out foreign donors. Instead, its operations appeared to be designed specifically to enhance the flow of illegal money.
The Newsmax investigation focused only on donors whose names the Obama campaign disclosed, which are available to public scrutiny through the Federal Election Commission Web site.
In addition to the donations the campaign has disclosed, however, it has taken an unprecedented $218 million from donors whose names it is keeping secret, according to FEC spokesman Robert Biersack.
That money came from individuals who in theory never passed the threshold of $200, the limit the FEC set for public disclosure of a donor’s name and place of residence, so there is no way of knowing how much foreign money could be included in that amount.
For example, hidden away amidst the unprecedented $150 million Obama claims to have raised from individual donors in September was more than $42 million raised from secret donors. These donations appear in the records as a single entry under the heading, “Donors, Unitemized.”
Newsmax retained the services of former CIA operations officer Frederick W. Rustmann Jr. and a team of international forensic accounting experts to comb through Obama’s donor list to identify those who apparently aren’t U.S. citizens or residents. Rustmann, a 24 year veteran field officer, operates CTC International Group Ltd., a West Palm Beach, Fla., firm that provides business intelligence services and analysis.
Using sophisticated Internet search tools, fee-based data bases, and other public records, CTC attempted to identify Social Security numbers and U.S. addresses connected to the Obama donors. Most of these donors gave obvious overseas addresses when they made their donations, but the Obama campaign had no security screen to detect them.
“Hillary and McCain demanded proof of citizenship of all their donors,” Rustmann said. “Obama did not, so he benefitted by receiving an enormous amount of money from foreign donors who wanted to influence the U.S. election process.”
NJ Community 