On August 29th, Barack Obama is slated to give his acceptance speech at Invesco Field. Controversy has been surrounding the tickets to that speech and the latest news, via CBS4, is that the Obama website had a secret page which sold those "free" tickets.
Recently it was reported at
Digital Journal.com that people were told they would have to "volunteer" to be able to get the "free" tickets to the Barack Obama speech on August 29, 2008, where he will officially accept the Democratic nomination for president.
His campaign denied it, yet others spoke to reporters with firsthand accounts of what was said to them and what was happening.
Today, as shown in the video above, CBS4 of Denver was alerted to a secret page on the Barack Obama website that was selling the tickets that the campaign has maintained were to be given away freely.
CBS reports said they tried to access the URL where the supposedly free tickets were being sold and they could not do so from the main site, but that when they directly typed in the URL that their source provided them, bypassing the need for a link, the page came up and the tickets were listed as $1,000 each.
The source that tipped off CBS4 claims he was solicited three times to buy the tickets from the website. CBS4 reports that the person that solicited the Democratic supporter was a consultant for the Obama campaign.
Make no mistake, selling tickets to the speech is not illegal.
What is being questioned by the CBS4 source is the ethics of publicly claiming the tickets would be free and then secretly selling them on a page that cannot be accessed except by those with the specific URL.
CBS4 was able to find the Web site only by directly typing in the URL provided by the source. While CBS4 attempted to contact the Obama campaign about the selling of tickets, the pay-for-tickets page was changed to say no more tickets were available.
An Obama spokeswoman that CBS4 contacted assured them that only a small percentage of the 75,000 tickets were sold and that the campaign was proud that the event was opened up for free to the public.
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