Let us start with the Hitler donation and move on from there to the Washington Post article today showing how the Obama campaign deliberately did not implement security measures which allow Adolfe Hitler and others to get away with donating money using things like pre-paid credit cards and avoiding the limits set to what a campaign can accept.
Meanwhile, last week a reader made a donation to the Obama campaign under the name "Adolfe Hitler" (Don't ask me why the "e") of "#1 Reichstag Building, Berlin, Germany", charging it to his Mastercard and is now getting welcome-to-the-big-change emails:Dear Adolfe,
Thanks for joining this movement. It will take all of us working together to bring change to this country, and we wanted to make sure you know about all the opportunities to get involved in your community and online.
Check out the resources below — learn how you can connect with fellow supporters, organize in your neighborhood, build our national grassroots organization, and stay informed with the very latest campaign news.
The WAPO piece shows exactly how some of these donations come to be accepted by the Obama campaign in a piece they titled "Obama Accepting Untraceable Donations."
Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity, campaign officials confirmed.
There is your teaser from the top paragraph, go read the rest to see how huge this problem is.
The bottom line here is that all campaigns end up having to return monies donated after reviewing the donations but Obama's campaign relied on over two-thirds of their donations coming from the Internet.
The Obama campaign has shattered presidential fundraising records, in part by capitalizing on the ease of online giving. Of the $150 million the senator from Illinois raised in September, nearly $100 million came in over the Internet.
Here is the kicker:
Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.
There is your bottom line... sure all campaigns end up having to return monies that make it past their security measures, and yes John McCain has also had to return monies deemed unacceptable from donors deemed unacceptable, but Obama and his campaign have deliberately chosen to not implement the basic security measures that would catch a large portion of dummy donations.
They also explain the problems with the pre-paid cards:
The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.
"They have opened the floodgates to all this money coming in," said Sean Cairncross, chief counsel to the Republican National Committee. "I think they've made the determination that whatever money they have to refund on the back end doesn't outweigh the benefit of taking all this money upfront."
The Corner points to another example which shows exactly how huge this problem really is:
Which brings us to the case of Mary T Biskup of Manchester, Mo, who discovered there were scores of small online donations made to the Obama campaign in her name, even though she hasn't given him a dime. They added up to $174,800, which is a wee bit over the $2,300 limit. This very generous donation was not billed to her own card, but to someone else's - meaning (as the Post says) "someone appropriated her name".
Ah, but who? And, if just one unwitting front is responsible for 175 grand of the Obama take, how many other Mary T Biskups are there out there?
Public financing a general election campaign was put into place and candidates for decades have been using it in the name of fairness, yet this election cycle, despite pledging to use the system, Barack Obama went back on that pledge and opted out of it because of his ability to collect online donations and the fact that he believed it would give him an advantage and he could attempt to "buy" the election by outspending the $84+ million that John McCain received by keeping his pledge to use public financing.
Obama opened the door to this type of fraud, then took all the security measures away that would stop Adolfe from donating without proper checks to make sure Adolfe existed, to stop someone from using Mary's name from donating $172,500 more than the contribution limits allowed and allowed people from other countries to donate illegally.
PowerLine has been all over this story and tracking people that have been testing Obama's security measures and has another recent example:
This morning we received word from reader Kurtis F. of his contribution under the name Crazy Eight:
Crazy Eight from Swindler Lane just made a $25 dollar donation to Obama for America. It went right through to my credit card after a two day delay.
No security code. No address check. No name verification. Nothing. Unbelievable.
At PBTS, John Ronning reports "How foreign liberals (and jihadis for the matter) can contribute illegally to the Obama campaign." They can do it the same way Crazy Eight and so many others have done.
Bill Dyer at Hugh Hewitt’s blog gets right to the heart of the issue by stating:
"Fully $100 million of the record-breaking $150 million that the Obama campaign collected in September alone came over the internet via credit card donations."
The Raw Story points out an Obama Lawyer, Robert Bauer, lies in order to try to justify their lack of security protocol:
Obama's campaign laws say they have scrubbed contributions that appear dubious. One lawyer, Robert Bauer, attacked the premise, saying, "I have not seen the McCain compliance staff ascending to heaven on a cloud."
Campaign aides justified their practice of vetting donations once they'd been received, saying that matching credit cards with people's name is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry.
That claim appears untrue. A senior technology adviser for Sen. John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign said it is possible to require donor's names and addresses match.
Any grocery store clerk can tell you that credit cards transactions are rejected all the time if an address, name or zip code does not match, so one would expect a lawyer working for a presidential candidate to be aware of the fact that those type of security measures do exist.
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