Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

On Thursday, January 21, the United States Supreme Court struck down Section 441a of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) which prohibited corporations and labor unions from spending treasury funds for independent expenditures in political campaigns.  In other words, while it has been permissible since 1974 for corporations and labor unions to underwrite the costs of maintaining separate segregated funds for political purposes… i.e. political action committees (PACS)… they were prohibited from spending money to directly promote or oppose the election of individual candidates.  The court let stand Section 441e which prohibits foreign corporations from making any “contribution or donation of money or other thing of value … in connection with a Federal, State or local election.”

Nevertheless, Obama and other Democrats insist that the court’s decision opened the floodgates to foreign involvement in U.S. campaigns.  In his State of the Union address last week, Obama took the unprecedented step of criticizing the decision with most of the justices seated just feet away.  He said, “With all due deference to the separation of powers, the court last week reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections,” 

With the TV cameras focused on the members of the court, Justice Alito was seen to clearly mouth the words, “Not true.”  So, was Justice Alito saying that Obama lied, or was he merely disagreeing with him?  If to lie is to utter a falsehood, knowing that what we say is untrue, then the justice was not merely disagreeing with Obama, he was accusing him of lying.   

So the question arises, if political contributions from foreign sources are a seriously bad thing, has it happened before and who is the worst offender?  The answers to those questions are, yes, and Barack Obama, respectively.  In fact, until Barack Obama came along we thought that Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s record of accepting illegal contributions from the People’s Republic of China, through men such as Charlie Ya Lin Trie and John Huang, would never be broken.  But that was 1996.  It took the Democrats just 12 more years to nominate a man with an ego ten times the size of Bill Clinton’s, but with only half the integrity. 

In July 2008, three separate news stories came together to form the basis for what is the most blatant and far-reaching political crime in American history.  The first was a story in which Obama boasted of having built a contributor base of 1.5 million people, each contributing $5, $10, $20… or, as Obama assured us, “whatever they could afford.” 

But the numbers didn’t add up.  The Obama campaign disclosed that one-fourth, or $66 million of the $265 million raised as of May 31, 2008 came from those contributing $2,000, or more… some 33,000 people.  This means that the remainder, or $199 million, was contributed by some 1.47 million people who made “modest” sized contributions.

Obama attended grammar school in Indonesia where they may have taught some archaic brand of mathematics, but $199 million dollars cannot be contributed by 1.47 million people in “$5, $10, or $20” amounts.  Each of those 1.47 million people would have had to contribute, on average, $135 to create a pool of $199 million… and that simply does not happen.  It has never happened in American politics and it did not happen in 2008… in spite of Obama’s assurances. 

The second story, titled “Attack of the Global Pirate Bankers,” appeared in the July 22, 2008 edition of The Nation magazine.  In the article it was reported that the financial institution UBS Americas had been “outed” in six months of hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.  The article began by saying, “Last week in Washington we got a rare look inside the global private banking industry, whose high purpose it is to gather up the assets of the world’s wealthiest people and many of its worst villains, and shelter them from tax collectors, prosecutors, creditors, disgruntled business associates, family members, and each other.”

But the most interesting disclosure, from a political point of view, was that the CEO of UBS Americas is none other than Robert Wolf who, along with George Soros, served as one of Obama’s top two money men.  The parent company of UBS Americas is the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Switzerland’s largest bank and the world’s largest private wealth manager, with $1.9 trillion in client assets. 

The third article reported on a Statement of Facts in the 2008 criminal trial of former UBS executive-turned-whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld.  According to Birkenfield, UBS took significant steps to help American clients manage their Swiss accounts without alerting U.S. government authorities.   For example, the Statement of Facts describes how UBS advised U.S. clients to withdraw funds from their accounts using Swiss credit cards that could not be traced by U.S. authorities, to destroy all off-shore banking records existing in the U.S., and to misrepresent the receipt of funds from their Swiss accounts… as loans from UBS.

The report went on to say that UBS had established an elaborate formal training program which coached bank employees on how to avoid surveillance by U.S. Customs and law enforcement, how to falsify visas and encrypt communications, (and) how to secretly move money into and out of the country… According to The Nation article, “Rich people the world over… are now free to opt into this sophisticated, secretive, utterly unprincipled global private banking industry.  They can become, in effect, residents of nowhere for tax purposes, citizens of a brave new virtual country, which offers… unprecedented freedom from the taxes, regulations and moral restraints that the rest of us take for granted…” 

Reading the three articles and putting two and two together, it was immediately evident that what we were seeing was a unique instrument for funneling illegal foreign political contributions into the coffers of an ambitious and unscrupulous American politician.  Here’s how it would work:

With the cooperation of a bank executive friendly to the American politician, sums of money would be debited to carefully-selected Swiss bank accounts, without the knowledge of the depositor.  The funds would then be sent to the U.S. presidential campaign as Swiss credit card transactions.  After arriving in the U.S., the Swiss credit card contributions, usually in Euros, would be converted to U.S. dollars and deposited in the candidate’s campaign account.  Because of currency conversion rates, the foreign contributions would appear in odd dollar amounts.  

Finally, as each Swiss credit card contribution arrived it would be, of necessity, disguised for FEC reporting purposes.  Teams of campaign workers would then select names, addresses, and occupations from lists of the candidate’s legitimate American contributors, overlaying that information on the illegal foreign contributions for FEC reporting purposes.       

When the owner of a Swiss account received a monthly statement, he/she might discover an unfamiliar debit, perhaps as much as $2,300.  However, elsewhere on the statement the depositor would find a credit in the same amount.  Assuming that a bank employee had made a mistake and had immediately corrected it, the matter would quickly be forgotten.  In reality, the debited amount actually ended up in the coffers of the American politician, while the funds reflected by the bank credit were the result of a deposit by a wealthy foreign contributor hoping to influence the election of a U.S. president.

When we published this speculation in a July 28, 2008 column, titled, “Who Owns Barack Obama?” the Newsmax.com organization decided to investigate.  They sent a team of investigators to the Federal Election Commission and here is some of what they found:

Newsmax found more than 2,000 donors who had given substantially more than their $2,300 limit.  One contributor interviewed by Newsmax, Ronald J. Sharpe, Jr., a retired schoolteacher from Rockledge, Florida, is reported to have given $13,800… $9,200 over his limit.  However, Mr. Sharpe does not remember giving that much money to Obama.

Sandra Daneshinia, a self-employed caregiver of Los Angeles, made 36 separate contributions totaling $7,051.12.  Thirteen of her contributions were later refunded.  However, in an odd coincidence those 13 refunds, in amounts such as $233.88 and $201.44, came to an even $2,300, the maximum amount allowable in any one election.

John Atkinson, an insurance agent in Burr Ridge, Illinois, gave a total of $8,724.26.  He gave in odd amounts such as $188.67, $1,542.06, $876.09, $388.67, $282.20, $195.66, $118.15, and one of $2,300.  In fact, Newsmax found 66,383 such contributions from 37,265 donors. 

Some of those contributions may be from American ex-patriots living abroad, but in those instances where contributors were found to be contributing, not only well over their $2,300 limit, but in odd unrounded amounts, it is not difficult to imagine how that happened.  With a roomful of campaign staffers adding fictitious names, addresses, and occupations to illegal Swiss credit card receipts drawn on a Swiss bank, it is easy to see how they might double up on some legal contributors.      

The magnitude of the crime is so great that it is likely beyond the capability of the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department to investigate it and prosecute it.  Nevertheless, it is a crime of historic proportions, it represents the financial foundation of the Obama campaign, and Obama acts as if it never happened.  Liar, liar, pants on fire.