Why has the Obama campaign allowed donors to use untraceable pre-paid credit cards, which can be used to evade legal campaign contribution limits and to hide a contributor’s identity? McCain’s campaign doesn’t accept pre-paid credit cards.
Pre-paid credit cards make it easy for donors to evade contribution limits set by federal law and it makes it impossible to verify who is making the contributions. The Obama campaign, which turned off its anti-fraud protections, claims that it examines its books for improper donations “after” the money has been deposited.
Thursday
Tobin Harshaw of The New York Times, The Opinionator, quoted
Bill Dyer at Hugh Hewitt’s blog:
“The Obama campaign has deliberately turned off the anti-fraud mechanisms available for internet credit card transactions. They have no clue how many millions or tens of millions of dollars have been donated to them in violation of federal election law. And now it turns out that the Obama campaign cheerfully takes even contributions from untraceable pre-paid credit cards, a/k/a ‘the pseudo-credit cards you use when you want to conceal illegal activity.'”
Bill Dyer goes on to say that Obama’s “back-end screening” farce is an insult to “anyone with a second-grade education.” Dyer wants to know who in the Obama campaign ordered the anti-fraud protections turned off? More importantly Dyer asked:
. . .why hasn't Barack Obama already fired every such person, and exposed them for criminal prosecution as aiders and abettors of national and international campaign contribution fraud?
An article in The New York Times by
Michael Luo and Griff Palmer, describes an analysis of the “questionable donations to the Obama campaign” and concludes that stiffer disclosure requirements are needed for contributions of $200 or less.
According to
Joey Bunch and Michael Riley of The Denver Post, Republicans are charging that by allowing pre-paid credit cards, the Obama campaign is open to fraud charges “at least in theory.”
Now the apparent Democratic Party plan to remove the campaign donation firewall that would disallow this kind of contributions has spread to state races. In Colorado Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer has called out his rival, Democrat Mark Udall, for also accepting pre-paid credit cards.
Regardless of who wins the election on Tuesday, campaign finance fraud charges are likely to haunt the Obama campaign until someone in the campaign can sufficently answer the question. “Why did the Obama campaign take down their firewall to allow these kinds of contributions from people they can't verify?”
