The Government Accountability Institute released a blockbuster study today on the issue of foreign donations in American politics, and in particular, the Obama campaign. The study determined three key findings:
- The absence of the industry-standard CVV and unknown use of AVS anti-fraud security for online credit card donations.
- The presence of a branded, major third-party owned website (Obama.com) redirects its 68% foreign traffic to a campaign donation page.
- Active foreign solicition using indiscriminate email solicitations and exposure to social media.
The branded site, Obama.com, was created in Shanghai, China, by an Obama bundler, but its present registration information is hidden.
If this story seems like a re-run, that’s because the Obama campaign also disabled the credit card verification system for online donations four years ago.
The Obama campaign had also disabled the credit card verification system this year, and was caught accepting donations from “Aunt Zeituni,” “Adolph Hitler” (occupation: dictator) and “Nidal Hasan.” “Osama binladen” also donated back in April 2012.
To understand how this happens, click on the link to our post from April 2012. It’s standard operating practice for online donation pages to include the CVV field, which a donor would use to fill in the code on the back of their credit card for security verification. As we demonstrated in that post, the Romney campaign’s donation page included the CVV field, but Obama’s did not.
That doesn’t happen by accident. Having run an online donation page for a political party, I’ve been on the inside of this question. It’s industry standard to include the CVV field; someone typically has to disable that field intentionally. Disabling the CVV field opens the donation page up to accepting money from foreign sources and from identity thieves who may have stolen credit card information from unsuspecting innocent parties.
To help prove the near-triumph of media bias for liberals running for election overruling all else in journalism now, it should be possible to normalize this story with the 1996 Clinton one. I’m betting there will be differences in coverage.
The same goes for the DOJ, which, given how things have gone recently, will probably never look into this as long as a Democrat is in power. I personally wonder, long-term, if some sort of different arrangement is needed for the DOJ, structurally, chain-of-command and oversight-wise.
I do wonder, though, how the DOJ thinks it is ever going to again investigate small fry for campaign-finance law violations it if doesn’t even take a gander at this one? I mean, with people still thinkng justice is blnd, that is?
Of course, no amount of malfeasance will come to light – other than ensuring racial preferences are adhered to – via the DOJ, especially under the Racialist AG’s purview.
To be sure, this is precisely what happens when radical revolutionaries are in charge of the levers of governmental power. Like ducks to water.Like thieves to unlocked house doors.
Moreover, a Radical-in-Chief who believes that his greatest triumph will be the deconstruction/transformation of America, is certainly on board with illegal campaign contributions, most especially from those hostile to U.S. interests.
The only shock is that the Liar-in-Chief gets away with it, and not that he attempts it.
Tragic.
http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/10/07/when-authentic-revolutionaries-hold-the-reins-of-american-power-centers-via-the-most-radical-regime-in-u-s-history-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
Look to Chicago.
Nadhmi Auchi’s London law firm targets American Thinker website
http://illinoispaytoplay.com/2012/09/30/nadhmi-auchis-london-law-firm-targets-american-thinker-website/
The GOP’s trying to disenfranchise campaign donators too poor to have ID codes.
/
hey snork. go to your mommy’s wallet. take out her credit cards. little rectangular pcs. of plastic. don’t know a rectangle? it looks like a long square. look at the back, see the numbers? guess what? the three numbers on the back are your mommy’s code. thats right even your $ 5.00 ho of a mom has a her own code, oh heaven forfend she must actually be rich. thats alot of knee work.
You know what that ‘/’ means? It’s an innernet thing. Go ax your kids.
Kido, you DO kow that snork was being sarcastic… right?
Clear intent to violate the law. Any first year prosecutor would slam dunk this. Too bad the Ministry of Propaganda will do all in their power to hide and cover it up.
Looks like this criminal pattern is well organized and established as part of the system.
What would that be called again?
ALTHOUGH IT’S BEEN SAID MANY TIMES, MANY WAYS:
Foreign donations should be easy to detect because they are not whole dollar amounts, but include cents. e.g. $10.13. This occurs when foreign currency is converted into dollars. The Obama 2008 campaign had many of these ‘odd’ dollars & cents donations.
Wouldn’t this be a great topic to bring up in a debate? Few people know it but lots would be outraged by it.
What a great point, Mike! Holy snoikies…I hadn’t thought of that!
Because of foreign currency conversions, there’s not only odd cents, which shouldn’t be there, but odd dollar amounts. [I forgot this point and picked it up at my last post on the matter].
If foreign funds are being solicited and accepted, this is a high crime and misdemeanor (an impeachable offense) because it violates the constitution.
Exactly. I confirmed this for 2008 by looking at donations for my home town of roughly 50,000: it was clear someone had looked at a legitimate round dollar donation and then used that info to follow with several ‘odd’ dollar and cents donations.
It would be interesting to get a list of currency conversion ratios for the days on which those contributions came and to run them through a computer to see if the dollar and cents converted into an integer amount of some given currency. If, for example, a contribution of $43.12 equaled 100 Slobovian shekels on the day it was given we can probably infer that that was the case.
I would be fascinated to find out what currencies were used and what the total amounts and percentage weight of Obama’s contributions were. It would give us an idea of just where those contributions are coming from.
It wouldn’t be easy, the underlying data is very fuzzy since you don’t know which exact conversion rate is being used or the vig that the middlemen charge for the conversion.
You may be right, but there may be other means as well to show that something is not quite kosher. Even if the vig is unknown for the conversion, approximations can be made. If X per cent of the donations on a given day are all evenly divisible by the same factor, as in say 25% were all evenly divisible by $1.27, we know something is wrong because its way out of the zone of randomness.
And I don’t know what information the database holds, but when I buy things online I am always asked to enter the expiration date for my credit card. Does the database hold this? If so, it might look kind of strange if a significant percentage of the transactions on a given day all came from credit cards that had the exact same expiration date.
Does anyone out there know what information this database holds, or how to get a hold of it?
My guess is that there is a standard currency conversion rate used by Visa and MasterCard on any given day.
Ah, but the donation website deals in US dollars; when I donated US$3.00 it appears on my statement as Aus$2.97, but the e-mail from Rufus Gifford said, “Thanks so much for your donation of $3.00.”
I don’t doubt your word for a minute. But the real issue is whether rich, rich, sources are contributing to the campaign, in which case I doubt they are bothering to go through such websites. “Progressives” tend to be stupid–consider the case of the forged letter about G.W. Bush, which was typed in a font that didn’t exist at the time the letter was supposed to have been written.
Once again–how much of this database (if any) is public information and where can you go to get it? Inquiring minds want to know.
You’d block all people setting up systems to donate a fixed percentage of something as well.
E.g. (though not for campaign donations) there’s a bank here that promotes “automatic saving” by sending a set percentage of your supermarket bill into your savings account at each purchase.
If your bill is $100, your account is charged for say $102.50, $100 for the supermarket, $2.25 for you, and $0.25 in “service charges” for the bank (if any, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re charging those, the advertising of course doesn’t mention it).
Can imagine someone, somewhere, having set up a similar system for campaign donations, donating say 1% of every payment made to his business to say the O’Bwama campaign.
Its so easy to get a prepaid debit/credit card its ridiculous. And does anyone think that these ‘credit card’ agencies are going to turn down someone looking to buy 10,000 or more of these cards at a time when the $9.99 ‘fee’ is taken out on top? Or report the unusual activity? And it doesn’t take a genius to run these cards through a computer program and turn it loose on Obama.com and make anonymous $199 donations like a dollar machine gun all day long. Too easy for someone like Soros!
Lets face it – Obama thought he could get away with all of this because he has DOJ under his control and we know how thats working for him – at least for now He’s safe as long as he holds the job of POTUS. And by the time he was done with his dirty work (8 years he thought!) he’d have vanquished all his enemies (the GOP – remember his warning to Hispanics?) so he’d never have to worry about getting prosecuted. That strategy seems to be backfiring since his reelection no longer seems to be a lead pipe cinch – and he knows it now! If half of what he and his Czars and cabinet members have illegally done is investigated with any vigor at all they might all go to jail. He should be impeached for the laws he’s skirted by fiat – trouble is Boehner doesn’t have the cajones for confrontation. He’ll have to go too if we can expect anything to be investigated.
Look for a mass presidential pardon to be issued in early January if Romney wins. This will include himself – of course!
Can the President give a pardon for currently uncharged offences? I may be wrong but I’m inclined to believe he cannot.
My understanding is that no formal charges need to be filed against someone receiving a presidential pardon – however – the person receiving the presidential pardon must admit to the wrongdoing in order to get the ‘get out of jail free’ card that they receive. That is so they can play that ‘card’ if they are ever charged in a court of law. I suppose they’d need to admit to each murder – con game – and any malfeasance while conducting government business. Might be an interesting read in some of these head cases. Axelrod’s would certainly be an interesting read since I’m quite sure he’s been peddling influence. Maybe even a senate seat?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#United_States
I can’t help but wonder just exactly who’s pockets all these millions of dollars in campaign contributions end up in.
Illegal foreign donations sound like a perfectly valid issue to raise in a debate on foreign policy.
And nearly any topic is legit in a town-hall debate. I could see raising this one in response to a question on tax returns.
“I have disclosed my tax return information. Which are you more concerned about, though: the taxes that I legally paid, or the fact that the Obama campaign is using a foreign website, with 68% foreign traffic, that sends people to a fundraising page with standard security disabled so that it is impossible to tell who is really making a donation, where they are solicited to make donations small enough that they don’t have to be reported? In other words, are you more concerned with what I paid in taxes 10 years ago, or with what President Obama’s campaign is doing right now to accept illegal foreign donations?”
C’mon, Mitt. “Hit back twice as hard”. Raising an issue in a debate circumvents the DemOp media blackout.
^^^^^^^^^THIS^^^^^^
Mit should find a way to insert that, even if the question is not directly raised.
Later, watch MSNBC trying to spin THAT! — Should be hilarious.
They had no problem spinning The Won’s bad debate performance – why would spinning foreign influence and money in a presidential election be a problem for the ‘thrill’ crowd – all with a straight face?
Repeat of 1996, and probably 1992 as well.
Dems love those foreign donations – proves how universally loved they are. Too bad they’re illegal, or they could use that as a campaigning point: “Vote for us! We’re the run away favorite of foreign countries who loathe Republicans and whose approval and affection you long for.”
Corlyss –
Look at it this way: Foreigners (or foreign gov’ts) love giving money to Dems because they know how crappy Dem foreign policy. And, guess what, the worse the foreign policy is for the US, the better it is for the foreign gov’ts that are giving the money.
Or, another possibility: The money may not be from foreigners at all, but from Soros-types who have found giving money in foreign countries is a way of getting around election laws w/o putting themselves in danger of being prosecuted for it.
One World Socialists (OWS) don’t abide by any laws of a single nation. They most certainly have no interest in silly little regulations on whether they can get one of their own elected. “By any means necessary” is their motto.
When you own the Propaganda and Lies Ministry, you can blameshift, lie, distort, and then assert executive privilege.
Your media co-conspirators are part and parcel of your corruption.
They will:
1)Question the timing of the report as political and not “proved”
2)Do an investigation, DEEP investigation, into Marco Rubio and highlight that “both” sides do this equally, only focusing ALL the attention on Republicans, with scant reference to Obama.
3)Find something that Romney said or did that was a “gaffe” and pound on it for six days straight
4)Wait for Republicans and conservatives to come out and say “Yeah, it looks fishy and stinks to high heaven, but we don’t believe in “conspiracy theories”, so EVEN IF THE DONATIONS WERE ALL LEGITIMATE, the “appearance of impropriety” ought to be avoided. Thereby watering down a conspiracy to commit a federal crime…down to a non-issue all by themselves.
For this story to get legs Romney or Ryan have to raise a stink about it in one of their speeches…then the media might give it legs.
Your thinking is parallel to mine – in a conversation I had with a ‘libertarian’ (He’s liberal folks) friend of mine we were discussing the differences between The Won and Romney – he swore up and down Romney has no plans – no plans for anything. My best advice to him was to quit listening to the talking heads on NBC ABC MSNBC etc telling you what Romney says (something gets lost in the translation) and start listening to the ‘horse’s’ mouth. He looked dumbfounded! Like “why would I do that”?
Indeed!
Then I asked him what The Won’s plans were.
Er…
He could not regurgitate one idea of The Won other than green energy. I asked him how our ‘investment’ of Solyndra has worked out. He got mad.
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE.
Surely you do not expect those who are crusading for the rights of others to do such silly little things as obey the law, or our guardians in the press to trouble them with such trivialities. That would be like expecting Walter Duranty to expose the crimes of Stalin.
The glorious cause surely justifies the means.
/do I need to?
C’mon folks, you’re making it really difficult for libs to keep their stories (excuses) straight. It is so important for the emperor to be reelected, that libs have no problems with lying to anyone, including themselves.
““Osama binladen” also donated back in April 2012″
Gee. You’d think he did enough by surviving thru the 2008 election year and being such a thorn in Bush’s side that Americans turned their backs on an important war and groveled for peace. If UBL had clapped Obama on the shoulder and intoned, “This is my only begotten son . . . ” he couldn’t have done more to install a passive accommodationist appeaser as President.
Funny how UBL’s credit cards survived the “Searchin’ SEALS” — Next question: Will they also vote ?! — Can we put a “SEAL” on them ? /
“Laws? We don’ need no stinkin’ laws!” So say Eric the Red Holder and ObamaRx.
Wish I had some hacking skills and could either shut them down or direct those foreign donations to the PAC of my choice.
This from an individual who got his panties all in a wad over the SCOTUS Citizens United decision, which Obama claimed would open the floodgates to foreign money infecting US elections.
This classless president actually called out the Citizens’ United decision at his 2011 State of the Union Speech, with the assembled supreme court justices sitting right in front of him.
Recall Justice Alito shaking his head “no” at Obama’s shockingly rude remark.
I think Alito didn’t attend the SOTU speech this year.
Law? What law?
Another front page story for our media? Sure it’s a repeat from Clinton, this is the party of scum, law means absolutly nothing to them. It is a dark & criminal group of moral degenerates we’re dealing with. And toss in the media as well.
That ‘GA’ on the Excel spreadsheet? That isn’t Georgia, that is Gaza. A call center in Gaza. Isn’t there some law against foreign donations to campaigns? Oh, yes, we’ll just ignore that, like the Warn Act layoff notices, or immigration laws, or any of that troublesome Constitution stuff.
I’m surprised this expose isn’t more popular. However, it seems to be buried even on tatler.
I am an Australian, residing in Tasmania, and I receive several solicitations a week to donate to the Obama-Biden campaign; I finally bowed to the pressure last night, and donated $3.00.
See “Donating to Presidential Campaigns”, wherein I observe that the main “Donate today” webpage does contain terms (specifying that only US citizens or lawfully admitted permanent resident may donate) which are out of sight unless the reader scrolls down.
You commie infiltrator sabateur you!!!
er, saboteur
Help me out here. Several months ago there was an article about biden telling a bunch of donors that they were a boring crowd or some such. They were from Turkey and whereverthefucistan. It was in the regular news. Why wasn’t that illegal. Please somebody explain it to me.
excuse me, that should have been “somewherethefucistan”
WHY IS HE GETTING AWAY WITH THIS
TREASONOUS MURDER AGAINST
AMERICA? WHO CAN STOP HIM AND WHY
AREN’T THEY??
This is a story that needs to get pushed early and often enough that the _____MSM has to address it! I was looking for some info on it and couldn’t find it with Bing (granted I’m no computer genius, but something should have come up). The Obama propaganda machine (MSM) is dodging this story big time, and no wonder- even the thickest heads would understand we don’t want China, Saudi Arabia, or the drug cartels electing our President. Real reporters, as opposed to “journalists”, would chase this story.