Obama’s half-brother runs questionable charity
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The group, the Barack H. Obama Foundation, was named after the president’s father and founded by his sibling Abon’go Malik “Roy” Obama, a 53-year-old polygamist who recently made headlines by adding a third wife — who’s still in her teens.
Its Web site claims to have provided drinking water in Kenya’s Siaya District, which includes the Obama clan’s ancestral village. The organization also says it has completed a madrassa, or Muslim school, and is building an imam’s residence. A photo of the tidy little school building is displayed on the site.
That and other photos on the site are the only purported evidence that the nonprofit has accomplished any of its mission.
A group of Missouri State college students who visited the Obama family village of Kogelo in 2009, and who met the president’s half-brother, felt something was amiss. They sensed he was an “operator” and decided to give their donation of 400 pounds of medical supplies directly to a local clinic.
“We didn’t know what he was going to do with them,” said Ken Rutherford, a former Missouri State professor who led the trip and who shared in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to ban landmines.
Rutherford said the Obamas’ relatives are the only Muslims in a village of 4,000 Christians and that Malik has a private mosque on his property.
Malik started his charity the year his brother ran for president.
The foundation claims to be a tax-exempt, federally recognized nonprofit. It is not.
Nor are there any filings of its expenditures, which the IRS requires of larger charities.
Alton Ray Baysden, a former State Department employee at whose Virginia home the charity was founded in 2008, admitted the organization has not even applied for tax-exempt status.
“We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise to do this,” he told The Post. “We are informally scouting for an executive director, someone who knows how to register the charity.”
The charity is not even registered in Virginia, a requirement for soliciting donations in that state.
The foundation’s Web site includes a donation form that says it has nonprofit status. Charity expert Marcus Owens said knowingly telling donors contributions are tax-deductible if they are not could amount to fraud. “If they haven’t applied for exemption, they can’t promise their donors that contributions are deductible,” said Owens, a lawyer and former IRS official.
The National Legal and Policy Center, a Washington, DC, watchdog group, made a formal complaint to the IRS and US Post Office last week alleging fraud.
Malik Obama, reached in Kenya, said the foundation has a budget of $250,000. When asked about why it wasn’t a registered charity, Malik, an accountant by trade, said that he was “in process” of changing that. The White House did not return a message seeking comment.
Malik is the oldest son of Barack H. Obama Sr. His father left Kenya for the US in 1959 when Malik was a toddler and his mother was pregnant with his sister, Auma. He enrolled in the University of Hawaii where he met and married the president’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.
The president didn’t meet his older half-brother until the 1980s. Malik — whom Obama calls Roy — was living in Washington, DC, and was married to an American Peace Corps worker. He now splits his time between Kenya and Virginia.
President Obama, in his book “Dreams From My Father,” describes arriving at a DC airport expecting to be greeted by his half-brother, but being stood up. Malik tells him he’s had a fight with his wife and asks him to get a hotel room.
Malik later served as the best man at Obama’s wedding and attended the president’s inauguration.
He claims the foundation is entirely his idea “and is not dependent on the endorsement of his brother.”
But the foundation seems to be capitalizing on the Obama name. A California-based company is selling T-shirts with the president’s image and the phrase “Yes We Cannabis.” It promises half of the proceeds will go to the Barack H. Obama Foundation.
PRESIDENTIAL ‘BRO’-HAHAS
* The Secret Service had a code name for Bill Clinton’s half-brother, Roger — “Headache.” Roger spent a year in an Arkansas jail for selling cocaine while Clinton was governor. He was also accused of taking bribes from Gambino crime-family member Rosario Gambino, a convicted heroin trafficker, as well as other criminals seeking presidential pardons.
* Billy Carter, brother of Jimmy Carter, famously smoked pot on the roof of the White House and once urinated on an airport runway in front of the press. The self-described redneck, who touted — and drank — his namesake “Billy Beer,” once tried to work as a DC lobbyist for the Libyan government.
* Lyndon Baines Johnson’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson, lived in the White House. But he was such a bad drunk that any time he headed to the bars, he had to be accompanied by the Secret Service to keep him from bad-mouthing his brother in public. He wrote a memoir called “My Brother Lyndon,” all about how he couldn’t stand him.
* James Polk’s younger brother, Franklin, was only 28 when he died of alcoholism. Another younger brother, Samuel, was so wild he incited a riot at Yale University and was thrown out.
* Ulysses S. Grant had a younger brother named Orvil, who lined his pockets with kickbacks from the sale of trading-post franchises.
melissa.klein@nypost.com
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