NATIONAL JOURNAL ON OBAMA’S FEC LOOPHOLES

When asked about the possibility that a single person could use fake
names to mask many donations sent via a few credit cards, [General Counsel, Robert] Bauer
responded that "both campaigns seem to be in a similar position."

Good sum up of Obama’s criminal donation schemes:

FEC Rules Leave Loopholes For Online Donation Data National Journal

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by Neil Munro

The increasing use of online financial tools, debit cards and prepaid credit
cards to make political contributions has created technological loopholes in
federal and public oversight of campaign donations.

The result has been a recent spate of news stories raising questions about
apparently implausible or suspicious donations to the presidential campaigns.
Right-of-center activists also claim that Barack Obama‘s campaign
has collected tens of millions of dollars from suspect overseas donors. Their
complaints spurred the Republican National Committee on Oct. 6 to ask the
Federal Election Commission for an investigation of the Obama donations.

To test the campaigns’ practices, this author bought two pre-paid American
Express gift cards worth $25 each to donate to the Obama and McCain campaigns
online. As required by law, the campaigns’ Web sites asked for, and National
Journal provided, the donor’s correct name, location and employment. The
cards were purchased with cash at a Washington, D.C., drugstore, and the
campaigns’ Web sites were accessed through a public computer at a library in
Fairfax County, Virginia.

The Obama campaign’s Web site accepted the $25 donation, but the McCain
campaign’s Web site rejected it.

Rebecca Donatelli, president of Campaigns Solutions of
Alexandria, Va., which processes donations for John McCain, said her
system rejected the donation because American Express could not verify that the
donor lived at the address given with the online contribution.

The McCain campaign does accept normal credit card donations because staffers
can easily check whether the owner of the credit card shares the same billing
address as the listed donor, she said. That address-check process costs the
campaign about 12 cents, she said.

"We could lower our standards and accept more money… but this is John
McCain’s campaign, and he wants to root out fraud in fundraising and have
everything open and as honest as possible," said Donatelli.

Obama campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro said, "We review our
contributions to ensure that the information donors provide is complete and
verifiable. We would only accept a contribution from a pre-paid credit card if
the donor provides complete and verifiable information, consistent with FEC
guidelines."

FEC spokesman Robert Biersack said, "The committees are
responsible for providing accurate information about the identifying
characteristics of their donors…. The precise mechanisms of that are not
necessarily written into the regulations."

Donors must provide, and campaigns must send to the FEC, the donor’s name,
employer and home city. But if a campaign has incomplete information on a donor,
it is safe from sanctions if the campaign sends a letter to the donor’s address
asking for more information, Biersack said. A copy of a passport is also
sufficient to validate an overseas donor’s eligibility, he said.

Campaign funding experts say that real-world difficulties present a
significant barrier to anyone trying to make surreptitious direct donations. For
example, National Journal‘s $25 donation would have to be quadrupled to
$100, and then repeated 10,000 times, to deliver $1 million to the Obama
campaign, which has collected more than $600 million from at least 3.1 million
donors.

Federal law bars individuals from donating more than $2,300 to a presidential
campaign (and a similar amount to a primary campaign), and also requires
campaigns to make a public disclosure to the FEC of the names of all donors who
contribute more than $200 in one or more transactions.

That is how Pamela Geller, an advocate of limited government
who runs the blog Atlas Shrugs, discovered invalid donations to the Obama
campaign from such fictitious or prohibited donors as Doodad Pro, Hbkjb jkbkj,
and a pair of Palestinian brothers in the Gaza Strip who donated $24,321 by
July. Since early October, Newsweek, the New York Times and
other established publications have described some of Geller’s discoveries. But
by ignoring these donations until last week, "the media has abdicated its role
as public servant," she said.

Kenneth Timmerman, a right-of-center author based in
Bethsda, Md., followed up on Geller’s work. In an Oct. 19 article for the news
Web site Newsmax, Timmerman argued that the FEC database lists up to 37,000
foreign contributors to Obama. These unverified donors made 60,000
contributions, worth a total of up to $63 million, he said. Donations ending
with odd numbers of cents, such as $55.32, he said, suggest that the donations
were made in a foreign currency before being converted to dollars.

[…]

But the Obama campaign’s failure to verify donors’ identities or
addresses is suspicious, he said. All campaigns collect that data to
verify donors and to persuade donors to work as volunteers. If the
verification checks are disabled, "there’s no limit on how much a
relatively small number of people could donate to the campaign on
credit cards," he said.

If they’re not checking the donors, he said, "they’re thumbing their
nose at the law." There’s no downside because the establishment media
will go easy on them before the election, and they can easily raise
funds to pay fines once they’re in power, he said.

When asked about the possibility that a single person could use fake
names to mask many donations sent via a few credit cards, Bauer
responded that "both campaigns seem to be in a similar position."

Did he just say that? McCain has all sorts of safeguards in place. Obama, not one.

It’s an indepth piece. The best thing I have seen yet. Please read it all over at the National Journal

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