Say Anything Blog

It’s getting ugly for Hillary.

The Los Angeles Times on Friday uncovered an amazingly generous spirit of giving from Fujianese immigrant dishwashers and trinket sellers, hundreds of whom “spontaneously” coughed up $1,000 or $2,000 apiece for Clinton’s presidential campaign. The $380,000 from their giving dwarfed the $24,000 that John Kerry raised there for his run for the White House in 2004.

Worse yet, when the Times checked the donors, more than a third couldn’t be found and most weren’t registered to vote. Some didn’t even have green cards. Immigrant associations were cited as the nexus of the giving, but in a high-cost city where local per capita income is $21,000, it doesn’t add up. In fact, it raises the question that someone is buying influence.

This Times story follows an earlier bombshell about Norman Hsu, one of Clinton’s most valued fundraisers, who brought in $850,000 before he was exposed as a swindler on the lam.

Hsu’s “bundling” of contributions from immigrants and people of low means in his debt had all the signs of proxy giving from someone hidden and higher up. As media scrutiny intensified, much of the largesse was returned to keep the heat off and the law at bay.

Clinton’s campaign is so full of questionable transactions that even the Nation, a left-wing magazine, has dug up a mysterious influence peddler named Alan Quasha who hires Clinton operatives and has links to top Clinton’s top fundraisers.

Here’s the opening paragraph from that Nation article alluded to above:

In the Clintons’ pursuit of power, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorata was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign before being unmasked as a fugitive. Her campaign dismissed Hsu as someone who’d slipped through the cracks of an otherwise unimpeachable system for vetting donors, and perhaps he was. The same cannot be said for the notorious financier Alan Quasha, whose involvement with Clinton is at least as substantial—and still under wraps.

When a liberal rag like The Nation is going after a Democrat, you know that Dem is in hot water.

Hillary is on the rocks, and Edwards is fading.  If these questions about Hillary’s fund raising prove insurmountable are Democrats really going to feel comfortable putting their White House hopes on…Barack Obama?

Hillary’s got a substantial lead over the rest of the Democrat field in pretty much ever poll that matters, but the election is a long time off and already she’s in the midst of scandal clouds that are getting bigger and darker, not clearing away.