China,  Hillary Clinton,  President 2008

Hillary Clinton Watch: Unlikely Chinatown Campaign Contributions Raise More Questions

October 19, 2007 /

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The candidate’s unparalleled fundraising success relies largely on the least-affluent residents of New York’s Chinatown — some of whom can’t be tracked down.

Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.

And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.

All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.

Flap knew the Norman Hsu scandal would grow. Plus, look at the Charlie Trie scandal. This is a continuing program of deception and money laundering.

Now, is there enough evidence for a Federal Elections Commission and a Federal Grand Jury to explore the faintest idea that offshore Chinese interests have been bolstering the campaign of Hillary Clinton?

Why has former President Bill Clinton REFUSED to list the donors to his Presidential Library?

This scandal will continue to grow as the Clinton campaign hurriedly starts to return contributions. If they can find them that is.

Will someone from the Clinton Cabal rat them out? And, what has Norman Hsu been blabbing to Federal investigators?

Stay tuned……….

Update:

The latest on Norman Hsu:

Jailed fund-raiser Norman Hsu began popping pills on his way out to California for a court appearance last month and continued to down over-the-counter drugs in a failed suicide attempt when he went on the run, the Daily News has learned.

Hsu’s effort to kill himself is detailed in court papers obtained Wednesday by The News. The “excessive number of over-the-counter pills” eventually led Hsu’s kidneys to fail and induced severe delirium. He was in such bad shape when authorities pulled him off an Amtrak train in Colorado that emergency room doctors thought he was suffering from West Nile virus.

Hsu, who helped raise some $800,000 for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) while a fugitive from crimes in California, is in jail. He is due back before a California judge Nov. 2. He also faces federal charges he bilked $60 million from investors in a huge Ponzi scheme.

Clinton has returned donations from 249 Hsu associates, but yesterday the Los Angeles Times reported some of the same donors also gave $263,000 to her Senate accounts – money she doesn’t intend to return.

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Update #2:
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.
Meanwhile, the online magazine Salon is wondering why the Clintons are not disclosing the identities of donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation as it increases its cash intake just as Hillary becomes the presidential front-runner. Bill Clinton refuses to release their names because he says they gave anonymously. Could they too be foreign and looking to buy influence?
For the mainstream media, and especially those on the left side of the spectrum, to rouse themselves to such reporting is unusual. It points to something very dramatic, like a threat to democracy.
Sen. Clinton knows that enforcing election laws is difficult. When she gets called out, she returns the cash, pleads ignorance, claims a vetting glitch and returns to normal.
Unfortunately, the odds of getting caught are low, the political costs are slight and the sanctions are so light they invite lawbreaking. Most candidates won’t go over the line, but a bounder like Hillary may cynically calculate that voters are easily distracted.
But things aren’t the same as they were in the days of Whitewater. That Clinton scandal may have been hard for the public to grasp, but the current shenanigans are not. News outlets are picking them up with ease and can describe them in a couple of sentences.
Also, the advent of FEC databases and political cash Web sites such as campaignmoney.com and opensecrets.com are providing transparency and easy access to financing information. They show who is buying whom in the electoral races, and bloggers and pundits are on it. If Hillary thinks this will dissipate like Whitewater, she is mistaken.

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