Monday, September 10, 2007

Clinton's Hsu's To Lose?

This is something I noted early on - while Hillary Clinton was one of the biggest recipients of Hsu's money (ultimate source still unknown), other candidates couldn't take advantage of the situation because they too had taken money from him.

However, this is interesting news nonetheless: Hillary is returning all Hsu tainted money. That's more than $850,000.

Who actually is getting that money if it's being returned?
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign announced tonight that it would return approximately $850,000 to about 260 donors who had been recruited or tapped by Norman Hsu, the disgraced Clinton campaign fundraiser who recently fled arrest and is now under investigation for his fundraising practices.

The Clinton campaign also disclosed tonight that it had decided to begin running criminal background checks on its bundlers — the dozens of individuals who raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors on behalf of a candidate, as Mr. Hsu had done for Mrs. Clinton. A Clinton adviser said that “vigorous additional vetting” of the bundlers, including the criminal checks, would begin this week, and that the campaign was hiring additional staff for that purpose.

Mr. Hsu’s mounting legal problems have created the Clinton campaign’s first major in-house controversy. While Mr. Hsu donated $600,000 to an array of candidates over the last three years, he had become first and foremost a Clinton fundraiser for this presidential cycle — one of the so-called “Hillraisers,” who held events for Mrs. Clinton and aided her in the highly competitive money race with a leading Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
If I were the FEC and DOJ, I'd be looking into those 260 individuals and see whether the money was a pass through from other sources.

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