Sen. Obama Presidential Campaign Q&AA Chicago Sun-Times Exclusive: Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign gave the following written responses to these questions about the Rezko court filing.
Q. What is Sen. Obama’s reaction to being referred to in the Rezko evidentiary proffer?A. We have no way of knowing he is the politician named here but we returned this money months ago for other reasons.
Q. Was Sen. Obama aware that Rezko allegedly had directed at least one person to donate to the senator’s campaign and later reimbursed that person, possibly violating federal election law?A. No.
Q. Has the Federal Election Commission or the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago contacted the senator or any of his representatives about these matters?A. No.
Q. Why has the senator donated to charity campaign contributions from Rezko and Rezko-linked people?A. In keeping with our practice of donating to charity donations from people who have been called into question through the legal process, when he was named in documents as potentially engaging in wrongdoing we thought it was appropriate to return his donation to charity.
Q. Does the senator think this development will have any impact on the presidential campaign or undercut the senator’s message that he is an agent of change?A. No. In fact, Sen. Obama has been a champion of reforms that have made campaign finance laws more transparent so that the public can more closely follow the source of contributions to campaigns. As with any campaign, occasionally individual contributions are called into question. Sen. Obama’s policy in such instances is to donate that money to charity which is what he did in this case seven months ago when questions first surfaced.
link Posted January 18, 2008
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New questionable actions emerge daily. You're probably familiar with many. But it's the broader pattern that disturbs me--how much the Clinton campaign seems to nurture questionable actions from her operatives, supporters, and surrogates. And how the campaign's actions go beyond drawing legitimate political lines to an all-too-Rovian instinct to do whatever's deemed necessary to take down those blocking Clinton's potential victory. Here's a representative list of actions that, taken together, offer a troubling portent for her candidacy and presidency.
Start with the hiring of chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn. He's CEO of a PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, that
prepped the Blackwater CEO for his recent congressional testimony, is advising the giant industrial laundry corporation Cintas in fighting unionization, and whose website proudly
heralded their union-busting expertise until it became a potential Clinton liability and they removed that section. B-M has historically
represented everyone from the Argentine military junta and Philip Morris to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster.
Then there are Clinton's campaign donors. Any major candidate has some dubious supporters, but Clinton's gotten money from particularly noxious sources. Start with her donation from Rupert Murdoch, who's given to no other Democrat. Add in massive amounts of money from Washington lobbyists and from industries like
defense, banking, health care, and oil and energy providers (though Obama's also gotten a lot from some of these industries). Then there's
Norman Hsu, who
brought in over $850,000 to Hillary's campaign after returning to the US following his flight to evade a fraud conviction (Hsu was subsequently rearrested, sentenced to three years, and is facing further federal charges, and the campaign eventually returned the money he'd raised). There's the Nebraska data processing company
InfoUSA, whose CEO, Vin Gupta, used private corporate jets to fly the Clintons on business, personal, and campaign trips, gave Bill Clinton a $3.3 million consulting contract, and is now being
investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly diverting company money to his own personal uses.
Mississippi attorney Dickie Scruggs recently
canceled a major December 15 Hillary fundraiser (with Bill Clinton headlining) after being
indicted for trying to bribe a judge. Major international sweatshop owners, the Saipan-based
Tan family, have given Clinton $26,000, complementing their previous massive support for Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay. That doesn't even count dubious supporters from the past, like
Peter Paul, the convicted con-artist turned event producer who coordinated a massive Hollywood Clinton fundraiser during the 2,000 election. Taken together, it's a pretty tainted constellation of backers.
Like most candidates, Clinton spends the bulk of her money on ads and mailings, and she's taken some pretty problematic approaches there too. I wonder how many of the New Hampshire women who voted last minute for Clinton were swayed by
a mailing claiming that Obama wasn't really committed to abortion rights because he'd voted "present" on some abortion-related legislative votes. Except that Obama had done so as part of a strategy
devised by Illinois Planned Parenthood to protect vulnerable swing district representatives. New England Planned Parenthood's Board Chair strongly refuted Clinton's letter, pointing out that Obama had a 100% record on all the votes that really mattered. But the mailing may still have damaged his support.
The distortion of Obama's position on abortion echoes Hillary's audacious argument that Obama really
wasn't against the Iraq war and betrayed his promises by failing to vote against war appropriation bills after the Democrats couldn't override Bush's veto. I wish Obama had bucked the Democratic leadership and taken a stronger stand. But it's a gross distortion of history to equate his positions with Clinton's overt support for the war authorization, refusal to apologize for her vote, and claim that she was really doing it all to promote more diplomatic solutions.
We can find further distortions in a mailing sent out before the Iowa caucuses by the independent expenditure committee of a key Clinton ally, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The AFSCME mailing attacked Obama on his health care plan by using a
John Edwards quote that was featured so prominently that recipients could assume that his campaign was the source of the attack piece. This and other actions so disturbed a group of seven AFSCME International Vice Presidents wrote
a public letter to their union president, saying that although the union had endorsed Clinton on a split vote, the political committee had no mandate to attack Obama. They demanded the committee stop what they called "fundamentally dishonest" attacks.
Other surrogates have attacked Obama's character. Twice they've tried to raise Obama's early drug use as a campaign issue--despite his having addressed it directly and frankly in his book Dreams From My Father. Hillary's New Hampshire campaign chair, Billy Shaheen, mentioned it first, claiming that he was only worried about how the Republicans might use it. Sheehan resigned from the campaign after a storm of criticism, then Black Entertainment Television CEO Robert Johnson (who's
backed Bush on issues like the estate tax) raised it again, with Clinton standing next to him at a South Carolina rally. After Johnson's words drew major heat, Clinton belatedly distanced herself from them, but the smear still stands, along with the disingenuous claim that those making it were just neutral participants, only trying to serve the Party's best interests.
more Ari Berman
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It's a rousing speech, though ultimately not very convincing. If Clinton really wanted to curtail the influence of the powerful, she might start with the advisers to her own campaign, who represent some of the weightiest interests in corporate America. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, not only polls for America's biggest companies but also runs one of the world's premier PR agencies. A bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying and PR firm--the Glover Park Group--that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton's campaign. Her husband, since leaving the presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons' closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose DC brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton's economic team in waiting. Even the liberal in her camp, former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, has lobbied for the telecom and healthcare industries, including a for-profit nursing home association indicted in Texas for improperly funneling money to disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay. "She's got a deeper bench of big money and corporate supporters than her competitors," says Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.
Polling CzarAfter the 1994 election, Democrats had just lost both houses of Congress, and President Clinton was floundering in the polls. At the urging of his wife, he turned to Dick Morris, a friend from their time in Arkansas. Morris brought in two pollsters from New York, Doug Schoen and his partner, Mark Penn, a portly, combative workaholic. Morris decided what to poll and Penn polled it. They immediately pushed Clinton to the right, enacting the now-infamous strategy of "triangulation," which co-opted Republican policies like welfare reform and tax cuts and emphasized small-bore issues that supposedly cut across the ideological divide. "They were the ones who said, 'Make the '96 election about nothing except V-chips and school uniforms,'" says a former adviser to Bill. When Morris got caught with a call girl, Penn became the most important adviser in Clinton's second term. "In a White House where polling is virtually a religion," the Washington Post reported in 1996, "Penn is the high priest."
Penn, who had previously worked in the business world for companies like Texaco and Eli Lilly, brought his corporate ideology to the White House. After moving to Washington he aggressively expanded his polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland (PSB). It was said that Penn was the only person who could get Bill Clinton and Bill Gates on the same line. Penn's largest client was Microsoft, and he saw no contradiction between working for both the plaintiff and the defense in what was at the time the country's largest antitrust case. A variety of controversial clients enlisted PSB. The firm defended Procter & Gamble's Olestra from charges that the food additive caused anal leakage, blamed Texaco's bankruptcy on greedy jurors and market-tested genetically modified foods for Monsanto. PSB introduced to consulting the concept of "inoculation": shielding corporations from scandal through clever advertising and marketing.
In 2000 Penn became the chief architect of Hillary's Senate victory in New York, persuading her, in a rerun of '96, to eschew big themes and relentlessly focus on poll-tested pothole politics, such as suburban transit lines and dairy farming upstate. Following that election, Penn became a very rich man--and an even more valued commodity in the business world (Hillary paid him $1 million for her re-election campaign in '06 and $277,000 in the first quarter of this year). The massive PR empire WPP Group acquired Penn's polling firm for an undisclosed sum in 2001 and four years later named him worldwide CEO of one of its most prized properties, the PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M). A key player in the decision to hire Penn was Howard Paster, President Clinton's chief lobbyist to Capitol Hill and an influential presence inside WPP. "Clients of stature come to Mark constantly for counsel," says Paster, who informally advises Hillary, explaining the hire. The press release announcing Penn's promotion noted his work "developing and implementing deregulation informational programs for the electric utilities industry and in the financial services sector." The release blithely ignored how utility deregulation contributed to the California electricity crisis manipulated by Enron and the blackout of 2003, which darkened much of the Northeast and upper Midwest.
link By AL GIORDANO
The $850,000 that conman Norman Hsu bundled for Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign are the gifts that Clinton will have to keep giving back, harming her presidential hopes not just monetarily, but also morally and politically.
Hsu’s upcoming court hearings together with a newly filed civil suit in California, plus the criminal (and likely civil) complaints pending against him in New York, will soon blast in stereo from the media capitals of both coasts. The courtroom fireworks will take away a considerable amount of the message control that the Clinton campaign has, until now, been able to deploy.
It’s a story with sizzle and steak. Major media organizations including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek have put many of their top investigative reporters on the trail through which a fugitive from justice rose to become one of the Clinton campaign’s top 15 fundraisers. With each new report, new lines of investigation open; the story has so many legs it’s a caterpillar. Although very potentially harmful to Clinton’s ambitions, the increasing scrutiny on those that provide and raise the millions required to win election to national office is long overdue and should be cleansing for democracy.
Last May, The Nation’s Ari Berman filed an important story about the Clinton campaign’s ties to corporate America, “Hillary, Inc.” It captured the contradictions inherent in a candidate who speechifies against an economy that skews toward “the privileged and the powerful at the expense of everybody else” while playing footsie under the table with those same interests. Yet the focus on the corporate nature of Clinton, Inc. isn’t entirely negative for the senator’s campaign: it can also imply–to voters made cynical by the constraints capitalism imposes on democracy–a level of businesslike competence in the rough and tumble realities of electoral campaigns.
The Hsu case is more dangerous for Clinton’s aspirations because it shows the incompetent underside of the Clinton organization; a sloppy and careless venture that back in the era of “1990s values,” was sufficient to help it politically survive its own self-inflicted wounds. But in this higher tech, faster information-flow, closer scrutiny 21st century that is upon us, the trademark recklessness that got the Clinton organization through eight years in power now veers toward disaster.
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Hsu was very talented at the con, and his prominence as a “Hillraiser” brought him new investors. Once they had anted up, Hsu then got them to donate to Clinton and others by implying that the return on their investments would be at stake. The more money he raised for Clinton, the more access and attention was fawned upon him. And it was all going swimmingly until late August, when the Wall Street Journal first reported that Hsu had bundled tens of thousands of dollars in Clinton donations from a California family headed by a postal worker that earned just $49,000 a year. That report sent other major news organizations digging, which led to evidence that he had paid money to some of his bundled Clinton donors (illegal under federal elections law) and, finally, the startling revelation that Clinton’s leading bundler was a fugitive from justice who had pled “no contest” in 1992 to defrauding investors.
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