posted August 31, 2007 01:59 PM            

It wasn't enough that about 150 people who either contributed or were part of Commander Corruption's fund raising campaign either fled the jurisdiction of the United States...or pled the 5th Amendment before Senate and House investigating committees.

Now, Hillary is involved in yet another campaign contribution scandal. There's already a Hillary campaign contribution scandal in progress in the courts. This is another and again, it involves Chinese doners, a group which has bankrolled the Clintons since their days in Arkansas.

So, where the hell is this money actually coming from? Accepting foreign money for campaign contributions is a federal felony offense.

August 31, 2007
Democrats Turn From Big Donor Who’s Fugitive
By MIKE McINTIRE and LESLIE WAYNE

From $62,000 for Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York, to $10,000 for the Tennessee Democratic Party, the full extent of fund-raising by Norman Hsu came into focus yesterday, as campaigns across the country began returning his money in light of revelations that he is a fugitive in a fraud case.

Beyond the hundreds of thousands of dollars he raised from others for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Mr. Hsu personally contributed more than $600,000 to federal, state and municipal candidates in the last three years, a review of campaign finance records shows. It was a startling amount of money for someone whose sources of income remained far from obvious yesterday, as visits to addresses he has provided for his businesses found no trace of Mr. Hsu.

In interviews with Democrats, a picture emerged of Mr. Hsu as a valued and reliable rainmaker, someone who was frequently tapped at all levels of politics to make a contribution, bundle checks or hold an event. In addition, Mr. Hsu donated about $100,000 to the New School, where he is a board member and where a scholarship is offered in his name, according to Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska who is president of the university.

John Liu, a New York City councilman who said he last spoke to Mr. Hsu a few months ago at a gathering of Asian-American Clinton supporters in Washington, said Mr. Hsu “certainly had a strong reputation” for being able to raise lots of money.

“He actually told me he doesn’t get involved in municipal elections the first time I met him, but then he went ahead and gave to my campaign, and others,” Mr. Liu said, adding that he refunded Mr. Hsu’s $4,950 donation yesterday.

The Clinton campaign has said it will give to charity $23,000 that Mr. Hsu contributed, and yesterday representatives of Mr. Spitzer and Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who received $50,000 from Mr. Hsu, said they would do the same. A spokesman for Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat who is a rival of Mrs. Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination, said Mr. Obama intended to give away $7,000 that Mr. Hsu contributed to his committees.

Mrs. Clinton appeared with Mr. Spitzer yesterday at an event in Manhattan, where she made her first public comments on the matter, saying revelations of Mr. Hsu’s past criminal problems were “a big surprise to everybody.”

“When you have as many contributors as I’m fortunate enough to have,” she said, “we do the very best job we can based on the information available to us to make appropriate vetting decisions.”

Mr. Hsu’s rapid fall was precipitated this week when the California attorney general’s office said there was an outstanding bench warrant for his arrest dating from 1992. Mr. Hsu was facing up to three years in prison after pleading no contest to a charge that he had defrauded investors, but he skipped out on a court appearance and was never seen again.

E. Lawrence Barcella, Mr. Hsu’s lawyer, said that Mr. Hsu was getting a California lawyer to represent him before the state attorney general. Mr. Barcella declined to comment on where Mr. Hsu was, or on the status of any bench warrants issued against him in that state. “On that matter, he will be represented by California counsel,” Mr. Barcella said.

Investigators believe that after Mr. Hsu skipped his court appearance in 1992, he went to his native Hong Kong and then continued working in the garment trade. At some point, Mr. Hsu, a naturalized American citizen, returned to New York and in 2003 made the first of what became hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to Democratic campaigns around the nation.

People who met him said they knew only that he ran an apparel business. Efforts to learn more about his trade hit dead-ends yesterday. Visits to companies at addresses listed by Mr. Hsu on campaign finance records provided little information. There were no offices in buildings in New York’s garment district whose addresses were given for businesses with names like Components Ltd., Cool Planets, Next Components, Coopgors Ltd., NBT and Because Men’s clothing — all listed by Mr. Hsu in federal filings at different times.

At a new loft-style residential condominium in SoHo that was also listed as an address for one of his companies, an employee there said that he had never seen or heard of Mr. Hsu. Another company was listed at a condo that Mr. Hsu had sublet in an elegant residential tower in Midtown Manhattan just off Fifth Avenue, but an employee there said Mr. Hsu moved out two years ago, after having lived there for five years. The employee, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about residents, said he recalled that Mr. Hsu had received a lot of mail from the Democratic Party.

Mr. Kerrey said he was introduced to Mr. Hsu about two years ago, and shortly thereafter Mr. Hsu joined the board of governors at the Eugene Lang College for liberal arts at the New School. He joined the university’s board of trustees last July.

“So much of the university is about the immigrant culture, and I liked his personal story, coming from China, and he had an interest in fashion as well,” Mr. Kerrey said. “It all intrigued me.”

He said that the university did not do background checks of prospective trustees, and that he saw no reason to ask Mr. Hsu to resign from its board.

posted September 04, 2007 03:38 PM            

Monday, September 3, 2007 9:11 AM
Written by Fred Lucas, CNSNews.com Staff Writer

Clinton fundraising flashbacks erupted last week as critics of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) demanded answers about some of her questionable campaign fundraising, aspects of which mirrored the "China-gate" fundraising scandal that plagued the 1996 Bill Clinton-Al Gore campaign.

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has returned money directly donated from a one-time fugitive, Norman Hsu, now in the custody of California authorities. But because she is keeping much of the money he raised for her, along with the history of Clinton fundraising scandals, the issue could linger, analysts say.

"It's not over as long as the press and other candidates keep pointing to it," Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, told Cybercast News Service.

"It's a legitimate issue, given the Clinton fundraising scandals of the 1990s. There is a pattern here. ... We ought to want to find out if a wealthy person is illegally getting others to make donations, then reimbursing them. That is a serious offense," Sabato said.

When the story broke last week, comparisons were instantly made to the 1996 fundraising scandal that involved Chinese nationals donating to President Bill Clinton's reelection campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Norman Hsu - a criminal fugitive since 1991 after pleading no contest to the charge of grand theft in a California court - has reportedly raised more than $1 million for Sen. Clinton's presidential campaign.

But it was the source of many of the donations - bundling individual donations of $2,300 for the primary and another $2,300 for the general election from unlikely donors - that raised the most suspicion among Clinton critics.

Though Clinton's campaign said the $23,000 that Hsu donated over the years to her presidential and Senate campaign and political action committee will be given to charity, she is not giving away the bundled money that Hsu raised.

Bundling is a term used to describe one person gathering a large number of political contributions under the names of many people. It is often done by heads of companies and other organizations who gather donations from employees to contribute to a candidate.

However, this is sometimes done to circumvent the individual contribution limits.

The most prominent example is the Paw family, who live in a one-story bungalow near the San Francisco International Airport. Having apparently never donated to a political campaign before 2004, the family has given $45,000 to Clinton's campaign organizations since 2005.

Combined, the family reportedly gave more than $200,000 to Democrats running for statewide office in New York. The Paw family is headed by William Paw, a mail carrier who reportedly earns $49,000 a year, and his wife Alice, a homemaker.

Another example was the Lee family in New York that ran a plastics packaging plant in Pennsylvania. They gave more than $200,000 to Democrats in the last three years. Nearly $40,000 of that went to Clinton's presidential or Senate campaigns.

Other Democratic politicians, such as Rep. Michael Honda and Rep. Doris Matsui, both of California, said they would give the money from the Paw family to charity. The Clinton campaign has not made such a pledge.

The Clinton campaign could not be reached for comment Friday despite repeated phone calls.

Hsu's attorney, E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., told reporters that his client did not reimburse anyone for their donations. It is a federal crime to contribute to a politician under someone else's name. It is likewise illegal for a politician to knowingly accept a contribution under someone else's name.

Still, the case already has unanswered questions, as the 1996 fundraising scandal still has unanswered questions, said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group.

"There is new money, there are straw donors," Fitton told Cybercast News Service, pointing to similarities.

The 1996 Clinton fundraising scandal, often called "Chinagate" involved numerous anecdotes but never produced a smoking gun. Reported events included the following:

- Clinton friend Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie pleaded guilty to charges of violating campaign finance rules in exchange for having pending indictments dropped against him in Washington and Arkansas.

- According to news reports in 1997, Democratic donor Johnny Chung received a $150,000 transfer from the Bank of China three days before he handed then-First Lady Hillary Clinton's chief of staff a $50,000 check.

- Then-Vice President Al Gore received political donations from Buddhist nuns who had taken a vow of poverty.

- President Clinton admitted in 1997 that he invited major campaign donors to spend the night in the White House. The Clintons hosted 404 overnight guests.

- During the investigation by the Department of Justice, about 120 people connected to "Chinagate" either fled the country or pleaded the Fifth Amendment to prevent testifying.

The Republican National Committee posted a fact sheet last Thursday entitled "Re-living History," which looks at parallels between "Chinagate" and the Hsu case.

But "Chinagate" was not the only Clinton fundraising scandal.

After fugitive Marc Rich's ex-wife and a Rich friend donated a combined $1.45 million to the Clinton Presidential Library, he was granted a presidential pardon just before Clinton left office in January 2001. Rich fled the United States after he was convicted of tax evasion.

Also, Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign was involved in an illegal in-kind contribution from Hollywood mogul Peter Paul. That incident resulted in a $35,000 fine by the Federal Elections Committee and the indictment and later acquittal of her finance director, David Rosen.

Hsu pleaded no contest in 1991 in a California court to a charge that he cheated investors out of $1 million to purportedly operate a business that didn't exist.

However, Hsu failed to show up for a sentencing hearing and went on to live a rather public life in New York as an apparel executive, donating to politicians and serving on the board of the New School. During that 15-year period, California authorities considered him a fugitive. He turned himself in on Friday.

Hsu's attorney told The Los Angeles Times that Hsu did not remember pleading guilty or facing jail time.

The issue could be a factor in the presidential race, said Larry Sabato, as some of Clinton's Democratic rivals have already talked about how it's time for a new, non-Clinton political chapter.

"My guess is that the Democrats will criticize her more than the Republicans," Sabato said. "It's the other Democrats who need to de-throne her by reminding Democrats that she will be just as controversial as the nominee or as president as she was in the 1990s. This is a good issue that connects the present with the past."

However, Gary Rose, a political science professor at Sacred Heart University doubts her Democratic opponents will pounce. He's not sure it would be effective if they did.

"Her support is so deep and so wide in the party," Rose told Cybercast News Service. "It's something that could come up in the general election with the Republican candidate and the Republican machine. But I don't think the Democrats are going to touch this one."

Fitton believes it will have some political impact even though the Clintons have been unscathed, to some degree, by scandal in the past.

"There is a group of people who believe Hillary Clinton is corrupt and won't vote for her," Fitton said. "Then there is a group who thinks she's a political hero and can do no wrong. A situation like this will give pause to those in the middle, which can make or break a presidential campaign."