Top Ten Felons, Fugitives, and Shady Characters in Obama's Life
Now that the increasingly erratic and desperately sleazy Obama campaign has decided to cavalierly throw around the word "felony" when it comes to pushing a campaign of lies surrounding Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, this seems like a good time to jump in the wayback machine for a look at the actual convicted felons, criminals, and dubious characters who have always been associated with Barack Obama's political life.
What? What's that? You don’t want to talk about this?
Objection overruled, Corrupt Media!
The President opened this door, and now we're going to walk right on through it.
Starting with…
1. Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich: Sentenced to 14 years in prison for political corruption.
President Barack Obama's chief of
staff, then a congressman in Illinois, apparently attempted to trade
favors with embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich while he was in
office, according to newly disclosed e-mails obtained by The Associated
Press.
Emanuel agreed to sign a letter
to the Chicago Tribune supporting Blagojevich in the face of a scathing
editorial by the newspaper that ridiculed the governor for
self-promotion. Within hours, Emanuel's own staff asked for a favor of
its own: The release of a delayed $2 million grant to a school in his
district.
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2. Tony Rezko: Sentenced to 10 and a half years for corruption and kickbacks.
Rezko raised money for Obama when he ran for Illinois senator, but not during his presidential campaign, the AP noted.
Obama also involved Rezko in a
house deal after he was elected to the U.S. Senate, a move he later
called “a boneheaded mistake,” according to a 2008 report in ABC News.
Obama wanted to purchase a home
that the seller had a specific condition on: the adjacent empty lot to
the house had to be purchased at the same time, ABC News reported. In
the house deal, Rezko’s wife paid the full asking price for that parcel,
$625,000.
Obama shelled out $300,000 under
the house’s asking price, paying $1.65 million, according to ABC News.
Obama then purchased a part of Rezko’s lot for $104,500.
“It was a mistake to have been
engaged with him at all in this or any other personal business dealing
that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe he had done me a
favor,” Obama told the Sun-Times at the time.
Obama said his connection to Rezko was “above board and legal.”
Rezko and others connected to him gave Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign more than $120,000, ABC News reported.
While Rezko's wife paid the full
asking price for the land, Obama paid $300,000 under the asking price
for the house. The house sold for $1,650,000 and the price Rezko's wife
paid for the land was $625,000.
Obama denies there was anything
unusual about the price disparity. He says the price on the house was
dropped because it had been on the market for some time but that the
price for the adjacent land remained high because there was another
offer.
Obama then expanded his property
by buying a strip of the Rezko land for $104,500, which the senator
maintains was a fair market price.
Obama later told the Chicago
Sun-Times, "It was a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in
this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or
anyone else, to believe he had done me a favor."
Obama had known Rezko long before the house deal, calling him a "friend."
An ABC News review of campaign
records shows Rezko, and people connected to him, contributed more than
$120,000 to Obama's 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate, much of it at a
time when Rezko was the target of an FBI investigation.
It's important to keep in mind that
this was dutiful reporting from the media. Any attempts to turn this
into the Bain-style narrative it deserved and still deserves to be has
always been blunted by the media. This is the shadiest land deal
involving a politician in my lifetime, and Obama got away with it
legally and politically.
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3. Courtney Dupree: Democratic fundraiser convicted of bank fraud.
Dupree, who attended the elite Wharton School of Business, was a rainmaker in Democratic circles.
In 2008, Dupree hosted a
$1,000-a-ticket fund-raiser for Barack Obama at his Broad St. apartment
that was attended by top aide Valerie Jarrett.
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4. Willie Shepherd: Obama bundler plead guilty to assault.
On Tuesday, Shepherd was sentenced to 12 months of supervised probation, according to state court documents.
Shepherd, the former finance
co-chairman of the Democratic National Convention host committee, was
originally charged with negligent child abuse and third-degree assault
that knowingly caused injury — a class one misdemeanor. Those charges
were dismissed and Shepherd pleaded guilty to the class two misdemeanor.
Shepherd, 44, the former finance
co-chairman of the Democratic National Convention host committee and
$100,000-plus bundler for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign,
pleaded not guilty to the charges last month at a Denver court hearing.
Denver police on Sept. 13 were
called to Shepherd's house by his wife, Sarah Trainor-Shepherd, who said
she had been the victim of domestic violence, according to the arrest
affidavit.
The court document says police
officers noticed a red mark on her brow and bruises on her face and arm,
but Trainor-Shepherd then told police she did not want to press
charges.
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5. John Corzine: Top Obama fundraiser currently under FBI investigation. Obama's "Wall Street guy."
Jon Corzine, now the center of an
FBI investigation into the handling of hundreds of millions of dollars
invested in his securities firm, was one of the leading Wall Street
fundraisers for President Obama’s campaign and suggested to investors
that he might take a top administration post if the president were
re-elected.
His new legal troubles, sparked
by the bankruptcy filing of his investment firm, MF Global, could
complicate the president’s efforts to raise money from the financial
community given Corzine’s central role in those efforts.
A recent list of top “bundlers”
or elite fundraisers released by Obama’s campaign listed Corzine in the
highest category -- reporting that he had raised more than $500,000 for
the campaign. A substantial chunk of those funds were collected at a
$35,800 per ticket fundraiser that Corzine hosted at his wife’s spacious
Fifth Avenue apartment last April -- an event that was touted at the
time as part of a concerted effort by the president’s campaign team to
reach out to well-heeled Wall Street donors who had been alienated by
some of his policies and previous public comments.
In a sign of his emerging role as
a financial guru for Barack Obama, Gov. Jon Corzine Sunday unveiled the
latest piece of the presidential candidate's plan to curb soaring oil
prices.
The governor touted an Obama
proposal that marked the latest clash between the Democrat and
Republican opponent John McCain over energy policy, as voters rank the
economy as their biggest concern heading into the November election.
In his plan, Obama calls for more
regulation in oil markets by promising to close the so-called "Enron
loophole" that exempts some energy trading from federal oversight. The
rollout also provided a showcase for Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs
CEO whom Obama referred to as "our Wall Street guy" at a meeting of
Democratic governors in Chicago on Friday.
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6. Shervin Neman: Obama bundler currently under investigation for fraud.
The Obama campaign will return
the donations of an accused Ponzi schemer who is facing an SEC
investigation, a campaign official confirms.
"With 1.8 million donors thus
far, we constantly review those contributions for issues. In this
particular case, we will be refunding the contributions and have placed
the funds in escrow until a trusteeship or other appropriate place to
return these funds is established given the interests of the investors,"
a campaign official told POLITICO.
Shervin Neman, a hedge fund
manager in Los Angeles, stands accused by the SEC of defrauding members
of his California Persian-Jewish community, the conservative Washington
Free Beacon reports.
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7. Abake Assongba: Obama bundler under investigation for fraud.
New Yorker Abake Assongba has
pledged to help President Obama win reelection, and as one of his 400
volunteer fundraisers, she has delivered $50,000 to the cause.
But she is also trailed by some
controversy, accused in court of defrauding a businessman out of
$657,000, impersonating a bank official and dodging creditors.
Assongba disputes the
allegations, but the mysteries around her personal life highlight a
challenge for Obama’s reelection effort and other presidential
campaigns. The astronomical cost of running for the White House requires
an army of bundlers, many of whom are strangers to the campaign. And as
candidates quickly learn, it is no small task to woo — and vet — those
citizen fundraisers.
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8. Alberto and Carlos Cardona: Obama bundlers with ties to a Mexican fugitive accused of attempted assassinations.
The Obama campaign will return
more than $200,000 in campaign donations from the American relatives of a
fugitive Mexican businessman and casino owner, a campaign official said
Tuesday.
“On the basis of the questions
that have been raised, we will return the contributions from these
individuals and from any other donors they brought to the campaign,”
said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the campaign.
The fugitive, Juan Jose Rojas
“Pepe” Cardona, fled drug charges and other legal troubles in Iowa in
1994 and rose to prominence as a wealthy Mexican casino operator. State
Department reports have also linked him as a suspect in attempted
assassinations of business rivals and illegal political donations in
Mexico.
According to a story first
reported by The New York Times, Pepe Cardona’s American brothers have
suddenly emerged as major Democratic donors — raising and contributing
up to $300,000 to the Obama campaign alone, mostly from relatives. The
donations put one brother, Alberto Rojas Cardona, in the top bracket of
Obama campaign volunteer fundraisers, known as bundlers.
According to the Times, another
brother, Carlos Cardona, has also been approaching political figures —
including a former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party and a former
governor of Iowa — trying to seek a pardon for his brother Pepe Cardona.
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9. Solyndra: First
company to receive taxpayer backed loans from Obama. Solyndra's
investors are Obama bundlers. The FBI raided Solyndra last September.
The Obama Administration loaned
over $500 million to Solyndra via an accelerated process; later, of
course, Solyndra went bankrupt and had to fire 1,100 employees. Some of
Solyndra’s biggest stakeholders were major Obama donors – George Kaiser,
an Oklahoma billionaire, raised between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2008;
Steve Westly, an Obama bundler, was linked with Solyndra; so was Steve
Spinner, another Obama fundraiser, who pushed the Administration to
greenlight the loan, even while his wife’s law firm was legally
representing the company.
An FBI raid on Solyndra Inc., a
solar-panel maker that failed after receiving a $535 million loan
guarantee from the U.S. Energy Department, may signal the escalation of a
probe into the Obama administration’s clean- energy program.
Agents for Energy Department
Inspector General Gregory Friedman, who has called the department’s
clean-energy loan program lacking in “transparency and accountability,”
joined in the search yesterday at the Fremont, California, headquarters
of Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6.
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10. Bill Ayers: Unrepentant domestic terrorist. Early Obama backer. Fellow board-member of the Woods Foundation. 4th of July pal.
As a presidential candidate in
2008, Barack Obama disavowed any connection with former domestic
terrorist Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground radical who was one of
Obama's early backers and his colleague on the board of the Woods Fund
in Chicago. We now have proof that Obama's association with Ayers
continued even after Obama had been elected to represent Illinois in the
U.S. Senate--in the form of a now-scrubbed blog post placing Obama at
the home of Ayers and his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, on July
4, 2005.
Dr. Tom Perrin, Assistant
Professor of English at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, was a
graduate student at the University of Chicago at the time, and
maintained a blog called "Rambling Thomas." He lived next door to Ayers
and Dohrn in Hyde Park. He wrote at 8:44 a.m. on July 6, 2005:
Guess what? I spent the 4th of July
evening with star Democrat Barack Obama! Actually, that's a lie. Obama
was at a barbecue at the house next door (given by a law professor who
is a former member of the Weather Underground) and we saw him over the
fence at our barbecue. Well, the others did. It had started raining and
he had gone inside be the time I got there. Nevertheless.
Dohrn is a Clinical Associate
Professor of Law at Northwestern University, and Chicago did, in fact,
record rainfall on the Fourth of July holiday in 2005.
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We all know the media will refuse to
vet Obama's sordid past until he's safely out of office. But other than
Ayers, every convicted felon and person under investigation listed here
was a part of Obama's political life while he was president or running
for president.
In the case of domestic terrorist Bill
Ayers, he and Obama enjoyed that barbecue together in 2005, when Obama
was only a United States Senator.
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