John Fund has a great piece on Hillary's Hillraising bundlers and how the Dems seemed to have cornered the market on bundling and sleazy contributions. This would include Edwards and Obama:The candidates are happy to tout their cash hauls. Just don't ask them to identify the contributors whose money disgraced donor Norman Hsu delivered to their campaigns.
Both campaigns are donating to charity the limited direct contributions Mr. Hsu made to them. But Mr. Hsu's influence went far deeper. In 2005, he helped host a California fund-raiser for Mr. Obama, where he introduced the senator to Mark Gorenberg, a venture capitalist who is now one of Mr. Obama's biggest fund-raisers.
Mr. Hsu later became one of Mrs. Clinton's top bundlers--powerbrokers who collect many small donations for delivery to candidates. He brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars to her and other Democratic causes. The Wall Street Journal reports that many of the contributions came from "people who had no prior history of political giving or obvious means for paying."
Take the Paw family of Daly City, Calif., which is headed by a mail carrier who makes $49,000 a year. Members of the family have given almost $300,000 to politicians, including Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, since 2004, often on or about the same days that Mr. Hsu gave money. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether any Hsu donors were illegally reimbursed for their contributions.
Last month, Geoffrey Fieger, the trial lawyer who was the 1998 Democratic nominee for Michigan governor, was indicted on charges he conspired to make more than $125,000 in illegal bundled contributions to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards. Back then Mr. Edwards flatly refused to identify his bundlers.
As for Mrs. Clinton, her spokesman Howard Wolfson told the Los Angeles Times that she was declining to release the names of her bundled donors. No wonder. The Clinton campaign has been frequently beset by contributors running afoul of the law. Last week, a leading Clinton supporter and fund-raiser in New Jersey, Mayor Samuel Rivera of Passaic, was arrested on bribery charges in an FBI sting operation. In March, businessman Abdul Rehman "Ray" Jinnah fled the country after being indicted on charges he funneled illegal contributions to Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats.
All of this recalls the 1996 Bill Clinton fund-raising scandal, which ultimately led to 22 guilty pleas on various violations of election laws. Among the Clinton fundraisers and friends who pleaded guilty were John Huang, Charlie Trie, James Riady and Michael Brown, son of the late Clinton commerce secretary Ron Brown. But a lot was never learned, even after the revelations that Mr. Clinton had personally authorized offering donors use of the Lincoln Bedroom and Oval Office meetings. A total of 120 participants in the fund-raising scandal either fled the country, asserted their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, or otherwise avoided questioning.
Go read the whole thing here.
