Suitably Flip

RNC Filing FEC Complaint Over Obama's Excessive, Secret, and Foreign Campaign Cash [Update: $34 Million In Particularly Filthy Lucre]

Instapundit notes an email from the RNC that reads:

"Republican National Committee (RNC) Chief Counsel Sean Cairncross will announce today a complaint that the RNC is filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against the Obama campaign. The complaint will address foreign national and excessive contributions accepted by the Obama campaign that demonstrate it is operating outside of federal campaign finance law."

The presumption is that the complaint relates to the pattern of thousands of evidently fictitious small-dollar donations Obama has accepted from donors like "Will, Good" and "Pro, Doodad" (irregularities that have already invited requests for verification from the FEC).  For contributions under $200, the FEC requires significantly fewer contributor details to be published by the campaign, unless and until their aggregate contributions exceed that threshold.

"Will" and "Pro" often reported similar nonsense (e.g. "Loving" and "You") as their employers of record and sometimes resorted to simple gibberish and random strings of letters that neighbor each other on the keyboard.

The country of origin for more than 10,000 contributions has also raised eyebrows at the FEC, with 520 appearing to originate in Iran alone.

The suspicion (my suspicion, anyway) is that these thousands of apparently bogus contribution records are being used to illicitly funnel tens (if not hundreds) of thousands [or tens of millions, per update below] of dollars to the campaign on behalf of contributors who either 1) have very deep pockets, but have already maxed out their personal contributions and need a way to shovel unlimited funds under the radar, or 2) are not U.S. citizens and are therefore prohibited from contributing.

After all, the campaign's displeasure at the Americans-only restrictions of American elections is well documented.

It's hard to imagine such a large scheme being perpetrated without one of more campaign treasury staffers being complicit (or grossly, willfully thick-headed).  In the past, the campaign has issued partial refunds related to these highly suspect donors, but (in another move that's marvelously idiotic in its most innocent interpretation) didn't refund enough to bring those donors anywhere near the $4,600 contribution limit.

Nor is this precisely strike 1 (or strikes 1-10,000, rather) for the Obama campaign.  Long-time readers will recall that no politician outside of New York took more dirty money from Norman Hsu and his band of straw donors than Barack Obama - more than $70,000 in total.  An unconfirmed account relayed to me at the time (by someone in a position to know such things) also maintained that representatives from the Obama campaign approached Hsu when they caught wind of his Clintonian largesse and began asking questions about where all of his money was coming from, agreeing to keep their mouths shut only when Hsu agreed to grease Obama's palm.

This is obviously just a distraction on the part of people who don't want to talk about socializing healthcare or imposing windfall profit taxes on select businesses, but I suppose for real law and order buffs, determining the extent of federal malfeasance perpetrated by the Obama campaign might be of at least passing interest.

Previously:  Good Will Funneling

Update:  Amanda Carpenter has much more info on the complaint (which will be formally filed on Monday), including this nugget.

RNC General Counsel Sean Carincross said various press reports have called into question at least 11,500 donors names. Those names donated approximately $33.8 million to Obama's campaign.

Carincross said, "There were no quality control devices," such as a method to verify a U.S. passport if a citizen was donating to Obama's campaign from overseas. He said he believed Obama had knowingly accepted foreign donations and taken no reasonable action to investigate the illegal donations.

For reference, $33.8 million represents roughly half of Obama's cash on hand, as of the most recent filing.

Erstwhile Pot-Smoking Hippie Senate Candidate Whines About Being Compared With Pot-Smoking Hippies

Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO), who was pulled over and arrested for (and subsequently pled guilty to) marijuana possession in 1972, and who voted in favor of Dennis Kucinich's Department of Peace and Non-Violence (but against funding the troops), is a candidate for U.S. Senate this year.  The aging hipster's campaign is so exciting, even Norman Hsu was inspired to contribute to it.

Now, Congressman Moonbeam is crying foul over an ostensibly buzz-harshing ad by Freedom's Watch that lampoons Udall's hard-earned reputation as a stoner and a peacenik.

Mark Udall is not a happy camper, and Freedom's Watch is taking all the credit. As Josh wrote yesterday, the conservative organization is up with a new ad slamming the Democratic Senate candidate for voting for a Department of Peace.

An attorney representing Udall's campaign fired off a letter to at least two television stations in Denver yesterday demanding that the ad, which shows an aging hippie bragging about the legislation, originally sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, near his beat up Volkswagen van, be yanked from the airwaves.
...
"The offensive representations and slanderous image directly tie Mark Udall to the use and promotion of marijuana. This is an outrageous portrayal that finds no credence whatsoever in fact" Friednash wrote to Cornetta. "Further, there is nothing in the Department of Peace legislation that authorizes the purchase of a van or that says one of the activities of the Department will be smoking marijuana in a smoke filled van."

True... but I'm not sure that was one of the ad's implications (nor is the legality of van purchasing a particularly controversial issue).

Watch the offending ad below.

Welcome To the Fray, Senator Biden

Longtime readers will recall that Barack Obama's newly tapped running mate Joe Biden was fugitive bundler Norman Hsu's 5th most richly lavished Senator, behind Clinton, Obama, Harkin, and Kennedy.

Over a 15 month period from 2005-2006, the veep hopeful accepted at least $39,100 from Hsu's suspected straw donors.

Hsu's Clinton gambit may not have paid off (and the $87,000 in illicit funds he allegedly steered to Eliot Spitzer probably won't be paying any dividends), but with multi-jurisdictional criminal charges pending, having a friend in the Presidential on-deck circle shouldn't hurt.

Guilty: Another Illegal Clinton Bundler-cum-Fugitive Faces Prison Time

Pakistani immigrant Abdul Jinnah may go away for as long as five years for filling Senator Clinton's campaign coffers in a very familiar way.

LOS ANGELES (CNS)  -- A Northridge businessman has pleaded guilty to funneling tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions to Senators Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer.

Abdul Rehman Jinnah admitted reimbursing employees and others for contributions made in their names. There is a $2,000 cap on individual contributions to candidates.

Jinnah faces up to five years in federal prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines when he's sentenced on June 2nd.

The m.o. of Clinton campaign fraudsters is fastidiously observed.

Indicted in May of 2006 for his crimes, Jinnah promptly cheesed it back to Pakistan.  After being hunted by the FBI for about year, he returned to California for a dramatic and medically complicated surrender.

[Jinnah] surrendered to the FBI on a year-old indictment Tuesday [May 29, 2007], then collapsed in Los Angeles federal court.

Looking tired and disoriented, Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, complained of chest pains and began shaking an hour into a contentious bond hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick J. Walsh. The judge interrupted the hearing for nearly 30 minutes while paramedics attended to Jinnah.

Sounds like Jinnah and Norman Hsu are working off the same playbook.

Thanks to JustADude for the heads up.

Clinton and Obama Play 1-On-1

I'm not going to bother trying to tease out the minutia that divide the two persons left standing on the Democratic stage in California tonight - just going to point you directly over to Hot Air's thread, where any notable video tidbits will be extracted for posterity and lampooned for fleeting comic relief from the suddenly deafening and ominous ticking down of the Super Tuesday clock.

Me, I'm waiting for the midnight hour, when the last-minute Presidential filers will upload their year-end financial disclosures.

Things to watch for:

• Was Sandy Berger briefly a paid adviser to the Clinton campaign during the fourth quarter, despite the candidate's insistence that he served no "official role"?
• Were any of the 4 Democratic Presidential candidates on Norman Hsu and Pals' payroll sloppy and/or audacious enough to accept additional contributions from previously outed members of his suspected straw donor network?
• Did Hillary actually accept re-donations by suspected straw donors whose money she refunded in the third quarter (as she rather astoundingly said she planned to do), rather than allowing that money to (hopefully) make it back to the people from who it was allegedly stolen by Bill and Hillary's "friend Norman"?

Stay tuned for updates...

Update:  The filing are now rolling in.  I'll be dumping any interesting findings here.

NYC Comptroller and Mayoral Candidate's Ongoing Hsu Problem

Yesterday, The New York Times reported that New York City Comptroller William Thompson has emerged the leader among several rivals in the money race for the 2009 mayoral election.

Alert readers may remember seeing Thompson's name in previous posts, as I included him in September on the roster of local politicians who accepted campaign contributions from convicted felon and serial fugitive Norman Hsu.  Hsu was recently re-sentenced to three years in prison for defrauding investors in the early 1990s and now faces a 15-count federal indictment for allegedly swindling investors out of as much as $60 million (money he's suspected of using to grease some 80+ Democratic politicians).

Hsu directly contributed the maximum allowable $4,950 to Thompson in 2006 and according to the campaign finance disclosures released just hours ago, Thompson has failed to return any of those funds.

This, despite the fact that such funds might be used to help compensate Hsu's victims, many of whom are current constituents of Comptroller Thompson, whose duties include the management of the city's $105 billion in pension funds.

Yesterday's financial disclosures show that three of Thompson's opponents in the Democratic mayoral primary who had also received contributions directly from Norman Hsu (City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Congressman Anthony Weiner, and Councilmember John Liu) managed to find time to return the tainted funds within the week following the Hsu revelations at the end of August.  Four months later, it appears Thompson has not.

In the early days of the Hsu scandal, Azi Paybarah at The New York Observer reported that an aide to Comptroller Thompson said he planned to donate his Hsu money to charity.  Indeed, there are three charitable contributions from September listed on Thompson's latest financial disclosure, which collectively approximate the amount he received from Hsu.  The problem is, according to the Campaign Finance Board, the use of campaign funds for charitable donations is explicitly forbidden.

A candidate is not permitted to take public funds that he has received for a specific public purpose, and re-direct them toward an entirely different and non-campaign-related purpose. Some candidates have argued that such expenditures are indirectly campaign-related because they generate good will and favorable publicity among voters in their districts. However, such benefits are too tenuous to be considered “in furtherance of” a campaign.

That might be why Thompson's counterparts chose to disgorge the money via refunds, in keeping with local election laws.

That said, Rep. Weiner and Councilmember Liu weren't able to get their hands completely clean.  Weiner refunded a total of $15,750 in contributions from Hsu, three members of the Hsu-connected Paw family of California, and four other suspected members of Hsu's straw donor network.  However, he received thousands more from Hsu's identified affiliates that he has yet to return.  Liu made just one refund - to Mr. Hsu directly, who only accounted for $4,950 of Liu's total haul of $22,950 in Hsu-tainted contributions.  Speaker Quinn's only problematic transaction was a single $4,950 contribution directly from Hsu, which she promptly returned.

Still, notwithstanding Weiner's and Liu's incomplete disgorgements, Comptroller Thompson appears to be the only mayoral candidate to decide to keep a check actually signed by Norman Hsu.  If the indictment against Hsu is accurate, that money was almost certainly swindled directly from some of the very people who put Thompson in his current office and whom he will ask to elect him mayor next year.

If Thompson plans to make the case that his mayoral qualifications are validated by his performance as the city's chief money manager, he may want to consider clearing his books of this indignity.

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The summary and transaction-level detail of the nationwide contributions of Hsu and his suspected affiliates are available in these Google spreadsheets.  A searchable database of campaign finance disclosures is available on the NYC Campaign Finance Board's website.

Previous Norman Hsu coverage

Norman Hsu Gets Three Years On Old California Charges

Fitting (if perhaps a bit lenient), given that it was an agreed-upon three year prison sentence that Hsu skipped out on when he went missing in the early 1990s.

A judge on Friday sentenced disgraced political donor Norman Hsu to three years in state prison after rejecting the one-time Democratic rainmaker's bid to throw out a 16-year-old fraud conviction.

The court didn't buy Hsu's legal team's absolutely stupefying argument that his right to a speedy trial had been violated by insufficient efforts to hunt down the globe-trotting fugitive (the previously mentioned "Sixth Amendment-wrapped turd of a premise").

The crime underlying this re-sentencing is wholly unrelated to the 15-count federal indictment against Hsu related to his alleged swindling of $60 million out of bicoastal investors during the present decade and the suspected use of those funds to illegally line the pockets of Hillary Clinton and some 80+ other prominent Democratic politicians.

Ten weeks ago, this sentencing was unexpectedly delayed (until just after the first-in-the-nation political contest) to allow Hsu time to "research" what was expected to be a possible plea deal.  I have an idea of the ace Hsu is pocketing, but it appears either California prosecutors were unimpressed with the information he proferred or he's saving it to play it for the feds (perhaps depending on whether the primaries play out in such a way that he feels he can and/or needs to make such a deal).

Previous Norman Hsu Coverage

Hillary Nabs 6th Hsu-Tainted Senate Endorsement

Today, the Clinton campaign is trumpeting an endorsement milestone, as Maria Cantwell (D-WA) became the 10th Senator to throw her weight behind Hillary.  A statistic the campaign doesn't mention is that Cantwell is now the 6th Senator with financial backing from Norman Hsu and/or his network of alleged straw donors to endorse Senator Clinton.

Other Hsu-greased Democratic Senators already in the Clinton camp include Dianne Feinstein (CA), Robert Menendez (NJ), Mark Pryor (AR), Debbie Stabenow (MI), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI).  Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), one of Hsu's most richly funded politicians, has not made a formal endorsement, but his wife Ruth endorsed Clinton in July.

Cantwell received financial support from Norman Hsu directly and at least 8 members of his suspected illegal straw donor network in 2005 and 2006.  If the 15-count indictment against Hsu is accurate, the illegal contributions he funnelled to Cantwell were financed with money stolen from dozens of innocent victims who are still awaiting restitution.  That illicit financial support helped Cantwell win re-election in 2006 and to maintain the office from which she now endorses Clinton's Presidential bid.

According to FEC records, it appears Cantwell has yet to refund a dime of the tainted funds (which exceed $15,000) in the wake of Hsu's outing as a professional swindler and serial fugitive.  Nor has she even disgorged Hsu's direct contributions (totaling $4,200) through charitable donations, the half-measure taken by many of her Hsu-gilded colleagues.

Norman Hsu Indicted

Will this federal indictment in New York shake loose whatever plea deal Hsu's legal team has been "researching" ever since winning a postponement of the California proceedings?

A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted Norman Hsu, a top Democratic fundraiser accused of cheating investors of at least $20 million and using some of the money to make illegal donations to political campaigns.

In the 15-count indictment returned in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the government accused the 56-year-old clothing-industry entrepreneur of duping investors nationwide with a massive Ponzi scheme.

The government said Hsu also violated federal campaign finance laws by making contributions to various political candidates in the names of others.

Via Michelle, here's a copy of the indictment (pdf).

Previous Hsu coverage.

NYT Op-Ed Columnist Still Fooled By Norman Hsu's Bogus Investor Pitch

In a piece that manages simultaneously to pooh-pooh luxury brands like Gucci and Prada for supriously manufacturing their ostensibly high-end, European goods in China and to castigate the "xenophobic" brand executives who seem to believe Chinese manufacture indicates lower quality, New York Times op-ed columnist and Newsweek cultural correspondent Dana Thomas supports the former claim with a questionable source.

[The high] prices are worth it, we are told, because these goods are handmade in Europe by artisans. In fact, that is not always the case — as we learned from the recent news reports on the activities of Norman Hsu, the Democratic political fund-raiser indicted on charges of investment fraud. Mr. Hsu told potential clients that he would use their money to finance the manufacturing of Gucci and Prada items in China — and promised a 40 percent return on the investment.

This was surprising, given that both brands have long maintained that they do not produce their wares there. A Prada spokesman reiterated it when the Hsu news broke, telling Women’s Wear Daily that Prada does not manufacture its products in China — though if you look inside one of Prada’s popular nylon toiletry cases, you’ll sometimes find a small tag that states otherwise.

Thomas may not have fully understood the nature of "the Hsu news", because at the heart of matter is the allegation that Hsu's apparel activities were wholly fictional.  The "charges of investment fraud" relate to an alleged Ponzi scheme, in which the only business being done was the recruitment of more investors (and the occasional flood of contributions to dozens of Democratic candidates).  I visited Hsu's stated places of business back in September and failed to find not only a bustling apparel conglomerate, but any trace of Hsu or his many business entities.

That's not to say Gucci and Prada aren't using Chinese labor - just that the allegation is poorly supported by parroting Hsu's phony claims.  Dozens of investors were hoodwinked by Hsu, a mistake that has left them tens of millions of dollars poorer.  At the time, his A-list political affiliations and the impressive early returns he generated for his investors were enough to overshadow Hsu's otherwise unverifiable business activities.  With these political and corporate veneers now stripped away, it's odd that Thomas is still so willingly duped.

Clinton's Irish Cocktail Party - Bring Your Own Straws

With the specter of so many illegal straw donors already darkening Hillary Clinton's fundraising doorstep, I guess they figure in for a penny, in for a Euro.

Guess who is coming to dinner in Dublin?

None other than former US president Bill Clinton, who is mingling with a host of Ireland's elite at a fundraising bash on Saturday night.

The 1,600 euro (£1,145) a head dinner is in aid of his wife Hillary's presidential campaign fund - and the places have been much coveted.
...
The paper said that some Irish people who were so desperate to attend the fundraiser have been seeking out US citizens through whom they can channel the $2,300 (1,600 euro) admission charge.

Saturday, November 17th.  Well, we'll just have to keep an eye out for that date when the fourth quarter disclosures are filed.

There really won't be much plausible deniability if this event generates a slew of illegal straw donations that are happily accepted by Hillary's campaign.  Her denial of any suspicion of the massive election law violations that appear to have gone on under her nose in connection with the Norman Hsu scandal already stretch one's credulity to the breaking point.

Given the seriousness of the civil and criminal charges already filed in the case, the multiple ongoing federal investiations, and the huge dollar amounts allegedly stolen from investors to fund illicit contributions to her campaign, any slipshod vetting of donors comprising the quarter million dollars expected in the Dublin haul will be utterly indefensible if it enables additional exploitation of this documented Clintonian security chasm.

(HT: Bryan Preston)

Today's Head Scratcher: Hsu-Greased Pols Lining Up Behind Clinton

[Important, confusing update/correction below]

The Hill has compiled an updated roster of Congressional endorsements of Presidential candidates (HT: Matt Lewis).  Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton is out in front, with 59 Representatives, 9 Senators, and one non-voting Delegate in her corner.  That gives Clinton 3/4 of the Senatorial endorsements and just over half of the House endorsements announced to date.

Here are a few other statistics worth a ponder.

15% of Hillary's House and Senate endorsers (10 of 68) received tainted contributions from Norman Hsu's donor network, compared to 7.5% (40 of 535) of all current Congress members.  A majority of her Senatorial endorsements (a whopping 56%) received Hsu money, compared to 28% of all current Senators.

That means legislators who threw their weight behind Clinton were twice as likely to be greased by Hsu as their average colleague.

(The percentage of Obama endorsers who received Hsu's support rate was not meaningfully different from the Congress-wide rate (7.7% vs. 7.5%) and not a single Edwards backer saw Hsu money.)

Likewise, Hsu-gilded legislators backed Clinton with roughly twice the frequency (25%) as Congress on the whole (12.7%).  Hsu's beneficiaries were 5x likelier to endorse Clinton than Obama (25% vs. 5%), while her endorsement advantage Congress-wide over Obama is only 2.6x.

Whatever causal link may lie behind the divergence is of course left to one's imagination.  The pattern does lead the more feverishly conspiratorial to wonder whether the seemingly scatter-shot dispersal of Hsu's support among dozens of candidates may have served a more focused end, such as the elevation of a single candidate for whom those recipients may have later had an opportunity to toss an endorsement.

But it's equally possible that Norman Hsu simply admires politicians who admire Hillary Clinton and that he chose to support them without so much as the most tacit of quid pro quos.

Or it could be a little of both.

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Update:  Oh, that's a little embarrassing.  It turns out I neglected to strip out the Republicans from the comparison.  When you do that, the differential between Hillary's support among Hsu recipients and Congress on the whole shrinks (roughly by half, substantially negating the 2:1 differential).  So while Hsu recipients are indeed twice as likely to endorse Hillary, that's primarily explained by the fact that Hsu gave no money to Congressional Republicans.  So all of the above is accurate; it's just not terribly meaningful.

A thousand apologies for the sloppy error, but rest assured the data make a similar point, even when you don't make this goof.

If you constrain the comparison population to Congressional Democrats, the key correlation holds.  The differential in Hillary's endorsement frequency among Hsu recipients vs. all Congressional Democrats (+1%) is significantly greater than the differential for Obama (-4%), Edwards (-5%), or all non-Hillary endorsees (-13%).

Another way to look at it (perhaps the most revealing way, and certainly a simpler way than the little roundabout we just went round) is to compare the percentage of endorsing Hsu recipients who endorsed Clinton versus the percentage of endorsing Democratic legislators who endorsed Clinton.  That gets us boiled back down to a single comparison of percentages - in this case 77% (10/13) vs. 54% (68/127), enough to illustrate the strong correlation (but not enough to dampen the shame).

Sorry again for the unnecessarily circuitous numerical journey.  I'd go and scrub up the post so it reads more cleanly, but documenting and rectifying our errors is what separates us from the animals.

And the mainstream media.

Hsu Case Postponed

Norman Hsu has just won another 10 weeks of California penal room and board, thanks to a postponement of his legal proceedings in that state unil January 4th.

The surprise delay raised eyebrows because Hsu's lawyers had filed motions asking the court to refund the $2 million bail he skipped out on in September and toss his 1992 fraud conviction altogether.

The postponement could signal anything from plea deal discussions to a ploy to fend off federal prosecutors in New York, who recently accused Hsu of a separate $60 million Ponzi scheme, one expert said.

"We're doing more research. These things take time," Hsu's lawyer, James Brosnahan, said...

Here's a prediction: Hsu is gathering documentation of the nature and timing of his relationship with one or more very significant people.  People significant enough (and a relationship with implications significant enough) that prosecutors are willing to give Hsu a surprising amount leeway to conduct such "research".

For a grand bargain to be worth Hsu's while, it would presumably involve negotiating with the U.S. Attorney in New York, who's wielding the new federal charges.  Skating on the 15-year-old California situation alone wouldn't go too far to brightening his future.  A palatable plea would likely require a reduction in those serious charges as well (or a favorable sentencing recommendation or some such) and that might require Hsu's "research" to yield a meatball of considerable spice, perhaps already proferred to prosecutors.

I think it will.

Say What You Will About Norman Hsu...

But the man is nothing if not bold.

Disgraced political donor Norman Hsu wasn't hiding from anyone over the past few years, his lawyers say. If California authorities really wanted to find him, they could have asked Hillary Rodham Clinton or one of the other prominent Democrats he showered with cash donation.

Hsu is asking a judge to toss his 15-year-old felony fraud conviction, arguing that his right to a speedy trial was violated because authorities weren't actively pursuing him.

Yes, Hsu is arguing that his due process rights were trampled because he'd undertaken the life of a fugitive and the state wasn't holding up its end of the bargain by chasing him diligently enough.

I have to agree that the authorities did an inexplicably dismal job in his pursuit, but I'm not sure I buy that this failure somehow disadvantaged Mr. Hsu.  Even if he can convince a judge to swallow this Sixth Amendment-wrapped turd of a premise, it seems moot,  given that Hsu was duly (and speedily) charged, pleaded out, and convicted of this crime back in 1992.  When Hsu cheesed it, he wasn't awaiting trial, but simply the formal sentencing of his agreed upon punishment of three years in prison.

If [Hsu's attorney James] Brosnahan fails get the case dismissed outright, he says he will then ask that Hsu be allowed to withdraw his 1992 plea because the judge who accepted it and was scheduled to sentence Hsu before he fled has since retired. If Hsu succeeds in taking back his plea, his case goes back to square one and could then go to trial.

"Mr. Hsu has the right to have the same judge who accepted his plea impose sentence," Brosnahan wrote in court papers.

Again, didn't Mr. Hsu himself cede that right by fleeing justice for the remainder of that judge's career?

However that plays out, Hsu has plenty of fresh troubles, in the form of multiple federal felony charges alleging his orchestration of Ponzi schemes and violation of federal election laws, and a pair of lawsuits brought by investor groups in California and New York, accusing Hsu of swindling them out of more than $60 million.

Still, I would imagine the prior felony fraud conviction could have an impact on sentencing for any additional convictions, which may be why Hsu is eager to wriggle out of it.

Any prosecutors or criminal defense attorneys feel free to weigh in.

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Previous Norman Hsu coverage

Unfortunately, That Train Has Sailed

The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reports on an apparent attempt by Hillary Clinton to reach out to the siderodromophile voting bloc.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign will close down Washington’s Union Station for all but the trains to hold a major fund-raiser there Dec. 6 — a month before the first and most-anticipated presidential-nominating vote in Iowa. The location is no accident, says a lobbyist who’s among the planners (though publicly still aligned with a rival Democrat): The metaphorical message is, It’s time to get on board.

Objectively, I'm not sure the "train" metaphor is inherently positive or inspirational.  Yes, you've got the Little Engine That Could (and to a lesser, creepier extent, Thomas the Tank Engine) as good train role models, but as the embarrassingly monied presumptive winner, Team Clinton lends itself more naturally to the image of the unstoppable freight train (which may or may not be what she's going for).  With all their momentum and pre-determined routing, the only interesting things trains do is derail.

The last time a train was in the the headlines, after all, it was only because authorities were dragging off a half-naked, delirious man in some kind of high-profile fugitive bust.  And that might not be the first thing Hillary wants voters to think of.

Hillary Defends Possible Straw Donor Cash With Disingenuous Straw Man Argument

Judging by Hillary's refusal to return the hundreds of thousands in Hsu-tainted funds that she raked in through her Senate campaign and HillPAC, and now her insistence that she'll keep (and keep on keeping) the questionably princely sums that are pouring out of low income, possibly non-existent Chinatown residents, one has to presume that she's decided the scandal has finally hit that magical Clintonian critical complexity, beyond which neither the public's attention span nor the media's already mild appetite for Democrat-damaging stories will hold her to any kind of reasonable standard of conduct.

She took advantage of the controversy's complexity this weekend in a defiant speech that addressed not the impropriety of keeping questionable funds, without so much of a second look even after serious questions were raised about the legality of those contributions, but the non-issue of the propriety of accepting donations from first-generation Americans.

A defiant Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she has no intention of curtailing her fundraising in the Chinese community despite reports that she accepted cash from dozens of questionable donors in Chinatown earlier this year.
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“I represent New York and New York is a symbol of the success of immigrants coming to America,” the senator told reporters Saturday after addressing supporters at the Oak Park Elementary School in Des Moines.

“I am pleased to have a lot of first-generation American support as well as people who have been longtime involved in the political process … I’m going to keep reaching out to everybody in our country. I want to be a president to everybody.”

Earlier this year, Clinton returned about $7,000 of about $380,000 raised during a fundraiser that targeted donors from China’s east coast after campaign officials raised red flags about the donors. It’s not clear whether other refunds will be issued.

It's a good try.  And possibly shrewd, in a wholly deceitful way. Hillary's disingneuous straw man argument may work if people are losing enough of the plot to swallow the idea that what she's being assailed for is accepting donations from hard-working immigrants.  That, she can spin into an "I'll champion the underdogs, no matter how much they the establishment tries to stop me!" cry.  But of course that's not what's at issue.

As with the Norman Hsu scandal (which I suspect can be tied to the Chinatown situation at some level), the problem here is one of significant irregularities among Clinton's donors, specifically an apparent financial inability of many of the tightly clustered contributors to afford such largesse.  In the Hsu case, the tainted funds came from two sources - alleged straw donors who were reimbursed by Hsu and investors in the New York and Orange County investment funds who were pressured by Hsu to contribute to Clinton in order to participate in what they thought were legitimate business deals.

The specifics of the peculiar Chinatown donations have yet to come into focus, but based on the L.A. Times' investigation and follow-up by the New York Post, the contributors in question either cannot be found (sometimes because their addresses don't exist), hold minimum wage jobs that typically wouldn't support 4-figure political contributions, are not registered to vote, and/or specifically admitted they had been reimbursed for their donations.

The Chinatown cluster involves some 150 donors, suggesting it represents a sophisticated, large-scale, coordinated effort to circumvent federal election laws.  As in the Hsu case, the implications here are severe enough to warrant a more mature response from the Clinton campaign than a dishonest dismissal of the problem as one of ethnic intolerance.

Case in point:

"We do not ethnically profile donors," growled [campaign spokesman] Howard Wolfson. "Asian-Americans in Chinatown and Flushing have the same right to contribute as every other American."

Agreed.  Just as they're subject to the same prohibitions from violating election laws as every other American.

If, as appears to be the case, Hillary has made the decision to bank on the scandal's complexity to save her not only from having to answer for these ubiquitous irregularities, but even from having to return the tainted funds, she may be in for a surprise.  The public's Clinton scandal stamina may not have improved, but as the sordid details and immense scope of Hillary's fundraising problems continue to unfold, more and more mainstream media outlets are taking an interest.

Surely, she could wriggle out of almost any underlying impropriety, but overt denials, dismissals, and failures to address the irregularities as they splash across the front pages (i.e. precisely what we're seeing now in the Chinatown brush-off and the sloppy and incomplete Hsu refunds) may make for a stickier mess.

Hillary says she wants to be "President to everybody."  She can start by showing everybody that she's dependable and conscientious enough to deal responsibly with serious issues when they present themselves, not sweep them under the rug or shrug them off as the product of the prejudices of others.

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Previous Norman Hsu coverage

Mama's Gotta a Brand New Hsu

Michelle and Allah both weigh in this morning on a shiny new story from the LA Times (which, incidentally, has sunk its teeth surprisingly deep into the Norman Hsu scandal, making it easily the outlet with the second best coverage of the affair, behind The Wall Street Journal) about a shiny new Chinese fundraising scandal for Hillary Clinton.

As yet, there's no readily identifiable kingpin at the center of this flap, but the gist is that parts of New York's Chinatown have become an improbably gilded neighborhood when Clinton comes calling.

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.

This is a suboptimal development for Hillary, whose lowball estimates of Hsu's tainted fundraising (that eye-popping $850,000 wound up topping a million) and whose reluctant and only partial refunds of Hsu-connected donorations have stretched the candidate's credibility when it comes to her insistence that the perpetual irregularities that have plagued her (and her spouse's) political finances are issues all sanitized by the magical cleanser of public financing.

The unlikely vein of campaign gold Hillary seems to have tapped in Chinatown certainly appears to be of the familiar Clinton scandal genus, but the species isn't quite identifiable yet - are these straw donors being quietly reimbursed behind closed doors, are they hard-working immigrants being pressured by local heavies to dig deep for their Senator, or are might they simply be figmental?

The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records.

And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs -- including dishwasher, server or chef -- that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election.

Of 74 residents of New York's Chinatown, Flushing, the Bronx or Brooklyn that The Times called or visited, only 24 could be reached for comment.

The Times went further and actually called on some of these listed donors (hey, that's my schtick).  Needless to say, what they found didn't clear things up.

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Previous Norman Hsu coverage.

Hillary's 3Q Refunds Part III: Pry It From My Senate Campaign's Cold, Dead Hands

Not only are the 249 refunds sent by the Clinton campaign to Hsu-connected donors riddled with inaccurate mailing addresses, but now the campaign is vowing to keep any money these donors gave to her Senate campaign or to HillPAC (more than a quarter million dollars, according to the LA Times).

I noted Monday night that even among just the 26 Hsu contributors we knew about prior to the Q3 filing, there was a refund discrepancy of $125,000 related to the Senate and PAC money.  Turns out at least 50 other Hsu donors also sent part of their contributions through these doors (doors which, of course, ultimately led to the Presidential campaign via the candidate's $10 million inter-committee transfer in the first quarter).  And Hillary's happy to keep it.

"Because we did not keep track of contributions in the same way during the Senate campaign we have no basis for knowing that these individuals were solicited by Norman Hsu," said Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson. He said the Clinton campaign had gone beyond what it was legally or ethically bound to do when it gave back the presidential contributions.

That's tough to sync up with what Clinton said on Meet the Press on September 23rd.

[O]ut of an abundance of caution, we did return any contribution that we could in any way, no matter how indirect, link to [Hsu].

I'd say donors whose Presidential contributions were explicitly bundled by Hsu remain at least indirectly linked to Hsu when they contribute via her other committees.  Here's an easy rule of thumb to fulfill that "abundance of caution": anyone bundled by Hsu gets all their money back.

Among the donations whose connection to Hsu the campaign has "no basis for knowing" are more than $30,000 from the California Paws, the poster family of the Norman Hsu scandal.  So far, Clinton has refunded just $23,000 to the Paws (less than half of what they gave her).

And how about Danny Lee (another of the original Hsu-linked donors, whose home address was once listed by Norman Hsu as his own).  Out of an "abundance of caution", Hillary saw fit to refund $4,600 to Lee, but not the other $20,000 he "contributed" ($9,000 of which came in after the 2006 election).  Lee's co-habitants Soe Win Lee and Yu Fen Huang also each gave Clinton $9,000 after the 2006 election which is not being returned (despite the campaign returning their most recent donations, in an abundance of caution).

Between the Paws and the Lees alone (Hsu's easily identifiable heaviest hitters), Clinton is under-refunding by $70,000.  The mind boggles at the campaign not being able to find any link "no matter how indirect" between these donations and Norman Hsu.

In choosing to keep the $250,000 in Hsu-connected money that came in through the PAC and Senate committees, simply because the official bundler of such donations wasn't recorded, the Clinton campaign seems to signal it's forgetting (or dismissing) the fact that these funds aren't tainted only because they were solicited by a career criminal and serial fugitive.  The funds are tainted because that criminal is accused of reimbursing some of the nominal "contributors".  Further, the criminal complaints against Hsu allege that he financed his massive and fraudulent contributions with money he swindled out of more than a hundred investors.  The FBI, the SEC, the FEC, and at least one U.S. Attorney's office are investigating and the alleged victims are hoping to recover the $60 million they say Hsu stole from them.

For Clinton to be winkingly holding on to hundreds of thousands of dollars that can be quite readily linked to Hsu (as easily as referencing her own refund roster) shows an abundance of something, but it's not caution.

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Previous Norman Hsu coverage.

Update:  Commenting on yesterday's post about 47% of Hillary's Q3 refunds being sent to the wrong ZIP code, reader and postal worker Terri confirms, "Wrong zip code with correct address will be RTS, Return to Sender. The post office does not take the time to look up the correct zip code and manually fix and re-route."

What a financially serendipitous series of 118 clerical errors for the campaign to make.

Update:  I've e-mailed the campaign, asking if they have any insights into what happened with the bum ZIPs and whether they plan to re-issue the refunds if they're returned to sender.  Some of the 118 were for nearby or possibly synonymous towns, but 66 of them were clear out-of-state (accounting for more than $140,000 in refunds issued).  I've put those 66 into a new tab in the spreadsheet, available here, which I also pointed out to the Clinton campaign.

I've also asked one of the SFI (the New York fund) investors who did receive his refund check, despite being listed with a bad (though nearby) ZIP, to check the paperwork and see which one the campaign used in the actual mailing.  If it shows his correct ZIP code, then this issue appears to be just a matter of a hundred or so clerical errors in the filing itself.  If it shows the wrong one, then it's a good bet that much of the $140,000 will have truly gone astray (and as a result, will be retained by Clinton, unless she fixes the addresses and re-issues the refunds).

Update:  I've heard back from one of the NYC donors listed in the filing with a bad ZIP code.  While he didn't keep the envelope, the letter enclosed with his refund reflected his correct ZIP code, so it seems likely that this was a foul up contained at the disclosure level.  The campaign ought to file an amended report so the database will be accurate, but hopefully the refunds (while frequently partial) will all reach their addressees.

Hillary's 3Q Refunds Part II: Return To Sender

I'm still in the process of separating out Hillary's 250ish Hsu-connected donors into their respective groups (allegedly swindled investors and suspected straw donors) and collecting the contributions these new donors made in prior quarters.

In my last post, I noted that 24 of the 26 Clinton-supporting donors we already knew about appear to have received only partial or no refunds this quarter (an aggregate discrepancy of roughly $125,000).  It's not too surprising then that the new names on the list also appear to be frequently under-refunded.

Assuming the discrepancies represent donations made to Hillary's Senate campaign (rather than her Presidential campaign), it's still not clear whether she has already or intends to refund those contributions (since those paper filings are not yet available for review).  Either way though, whether she's refunding them from the other committee or whether she's decided to keep those funds, the total Hsu-connected contributions to Hillary the candidate will wind up being far higher than the $850,000 figure she disclosed last month.

Neglecting to refund the Senate-side contributions from Hsu-related donors (if that's the explanation for the discrepancy) could be the product either of heroic brazenness or extreme sloppiness.  And while I won't accuse Clinton of not being brazen, the more I look at the 3rd quarter filing, the more I'm leaning toward extreme sloppiness.

I realized something was seriously askew when I noticed a few California addresses among the refunded donors with New York City ZIP codes.  And vice versa.  With a little help from Google Maps, I ran the ZIP code for each of the nearly 250 refunds issued on 9/14 and found that 118 (47%) were incorrect.  What's more, 66 of the ZIP codes used (27%) didn't even hit the right state.  They're frequently hundreds or even thousands of miles off.

• Deborah Webster of Huntington Beach? Her refund went to Miami Beach: 2,700 miles off.
• Stephanie Trinidad of Palo Alto?  Hers went to the Bronx: 2,900 miles off.
• Charles Lafollette of Manhattan?  Honolulu: 5,000 miles off.

See for yourself.

If this wasn't a last minute clerical error (one which only affected the disclosure filing and not the mailings) and these ZIP codes were actually used as reported, something tells me a lot of these mislabeled refunds (which exceed $215,000) are never finding their way to their addressees.

But back to the issue of whether the under-refunded contributors are actually receiving their full refunds (and we just can't tell because we can't see the Senate-side disclosure yet), I'm leaning ever further toward no.  Whether the inaccurate Clinton estimate of $850,000 came in too low because she's planning on keeping tainted funds that came in through the Senate door or whether sloppiness prevented the campaign from even noticing those funds when sweeping up the Hsu monies, the fact that the campaign's estimate excludes such funds suggests they're not part of any refund plan.

To that point, I heard from a member of the Orange County investor group earlier today who reports on a Clinton refund that came in about 37% light.  Of course it's possible that there's another check on the way, but Hillary claimed on Meet the Press more than three weeks ago that all refunds had been issued.  Mail doesn't take that long (unless it has a bogus ZIP code of course).

The next installment will be a new Clinton grand total, including the actual refunds issued (between $800,000 and $850,000), the $125,000 discrepancy associated with the original 26 known donors, and the yet-to-be-quantified discrepancies that also appear to plague the roster of the 200+ newly unearthed donors.

Any guesses where the wheel stops?  We know it'll be north of $925,000.  If the discrepancy rate remains unchanged, the tally could top $2 million.  Register your pick in the comments.  TPIR rules, but only your most recent guess counts.

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This way to previous Hsu coverage.

Update:  A couple updates regarding the ZIP code issue in Part III.

Update:  I've heard back from one of the NYC donors listed in the filing with a bad ZIP code.  While he didn't keep the envelope, the letter enclosed with his refund reflected his correct ZIP code, so it seems likely that this was a foul up contained at the disclosure level.  The campaign ought to file an amended report so the database will be accurate, but hopefully the refunds (while frequently partial) will all reach their addressees.

Hillary's 3rd Quarter Refunds: Large, But Lacking

Hoo boy, this is one meaty filing.  Senator Clinton previously vowed to return $850,000 in Norman Hsu-connected contributions to some 260 donors.  Her 3rd quarter filing shows refunds to no fewer than 487 individuals for a total of $1.24 million.

This will take a little time to chew through, but we now have our arms around the 200+ missing Hsu donors and the several hundred thousand missing dollars.  It's just a matter of eliminating the unrelated refunds (accidental overpayments and the like) before we'll have a list of the previously unknown Hsu-connected donors to trace back through prior periods for both Clinton and other Hsu-favored candidates to bring us up to the new grand total.

But even before we do the deep dive, some problems bubble feverishly to the surface.

Consider this a rough cut through the data, subject to revision, but I'm showing more than $125,000 in thus far unrefunded contributions made by previously identified suspected Hsu straw donors (most of whom the Clinton campaign seems to acknowledge as Hsu-connected donors by virtue of the partial refunds they issued during the quarter).

18 of the 26 Hsu-connected donors listed below receieved only partial refunds for their aggregate Clinton contributions.  Just 2 of them received full refunds.  6 others (including 2 members of the Paw family) received no refunds.

It's important to note that this data does not include any refunds that HillPAC may have separately issued.  Once that data is available, I'll update accordingly.  As currently illustrated, the Clinton campaign appears to have refunded just over 40% of the previously identified Hsu-connected donations.

It's also important to remember that any of these Clinton donors who were reimbursed by Norman Hsu for such donations (allegedly with funds Hsu swindled out of unwitting investors) are not the legitimate owners of those funds.  Hundreds of investors in New York and California who allege Hsu bilked them out of more than $60 million are the primary aggrieved parties to any such swindling. Clinton's refunds, however partial, represent only the first step in returning such funds to their rightful owners.

We can only hope that federal authorities are rapidly chasing down each refund recipient to determine the appropriate dispotition of the involved funds, per the outcome of the ongoing civil and criminal complaints pending against Hsu.

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For background research, earlier ruminations, and links to the online data sets, sidle on over to the Norman Hsu category page.

Update:  It's possible some of the missing funds were refunded via Hillary's Senate campaign fund, though most of that money was transferred to her Presidential campaign during the first quarter of this year.  While the third quarter report for Clinton's Senate campaign committee was also due October 15th, those filings are not submitted electronically and are therefore not yet available for review.  Via the Center for Responsive Politics, the most recent data is current as of 12/31/06.

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Update (10/16): Well, I was going to post an update, but it grew into a post of its own.  This way, please.

Tom Vilsack, Come On Down!

You're the first Norman Hsu recipient to play 3rd Quarter Reconciliation!

While no longer an active candidate for President, Vilsack received a total of $4,300 from Hsu and his previously identified suspected straw donors, between May 3rd and May 10th of this year.

Until now, I'd only known about $3,800 of it, despite each of these donors being on the list, since the Vilsack campaign had recorded Soe Win Lee's name incorrectly at the time of her contribution.  Happily, Lee's name appears to have been spelled properly on the refund, as filed minutes ago by Vilsack's campaign committee.

Also reflected in that filing are refunds to Paul Su ($1,000) and Susan Chilman ($500).

Indulge me in a moment of quiet self-blandishment for having correctly identified Susan Chilman (aka the actress Susan Pari) as a Hsu bundlee, something you've read only on this blog.

*moment*

Those three refunds (each issued on 9/22) total $2,000, which takes care of everyone on the list, except Mr. Hsu himself, who contributed $2,300 on May 3rd.  Vilsack likely turned this money over to the United Way of Iowa, as his campaign cut them a check for $2,300 on August 30th.  Wave goodbye to that money, victims of Hsu's alleged Ponzi schemes.

Vilsack's Q3 filing also leaves us with a shiny little gem by the name of Seema Hingorani of Darien, Connecticut, the only other individual to receive a refund from Vilsack on 9/22, hers for $2,300.  Glancing at Hingorani's contribution history, we see her donations fit the Hsu donor pattern very nicely (including nearly $14,000 to Hillary and HillPAC and more than $26,000 to the DSCC since 2005).  I'd come upon Seema (and the two other Connecticut Hingoranis) previously, due to their fitting the Hsu contribution pattern so well, but never included them in the data primarily because Seema appears to have a legitimate and presumably high paying job, which is a decently predictive exclusionary criterion among suspected Hsu straw donors.  The Vilsack refund, however, seems to plant at least Seema if not the other Hingoranis firmly into the presumed Hsu-connected donor group.

Hingorani is sure to be just the first of (quite literally) hundreds of new Hsu-connected donors that will be unearthed by the end of the day.  Most will emerge when Hillary's filing is uploaded, though many of them will be alleged victims (coerced into making contributions as a condition of their participation in Hsu's ostensibly legitimate business deals), rather than allegedly reimbursed straw donors of the Paw ilk.

I won't be updating the data review in real time like this throughout the day, but I wanted to walk through this first very fertile filing step-by-step as a preview of things to come.

It's going to be a long night, on the other side of which we're likely to find ourselves discussing a much larger scandal.

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Previous coverage available in the Norman Hsu archives.

The Long Awaited Hsu Catalog

Today, The Wall Street Journal reports on the recent seizure warrants executed at Norman Hsu's SoHo apartment (pictured).  Thanks to the documents disclosed by the FBI, we now have a decently detailed accounting of what he'd left laying around.  And some of the details qualify as salacious.  Or at least intriguing.

Among the haul, find a previously unknown Hsu business entity, connections with 3 previously unknown investment firms (one of which is closely tied to some of Hsu's favorite politicians), and a possible connection to another huge Ponzi scheme (5 times huger than the one Hsu's currently charged with) which has already landed some folks behind bars.

So, on to the seized items...

In addition to that saxophone signed by Bill Clinton, agents found an extensive wine collection (including nearly a case of 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, which fetches between $2,000 and $40,000 a bottle), a heap of highly relevant financial records, correspondence from politicians, and a Best Buy's worth of consumer electronics.  Anyone with a Motorola Verizon phone, a Samsung Sprint phone, and 3 Cingular Blackberrys likely either can't stand to be outside his service area or is trying to separate billing records.  Also seized were two laptops, a desktop, an iPod, and several portable drives and memory cards.  Even if the digital media has all been wiped clean and fried, investigators will be busying themselves blind with the trove of bank records, loan agreements, leases, investor materials, checks, and other financial records they turned up.  The FBI's itemized seizure inventory is available here (records and media) and here (wine collection) as PDFs of scanned handwritten pages.

But since few things in life are as unwieldy as PDFs of scanned handwritten pages, I've gone to the trouble of fixing us a nice, user-friendly spreadsheet instead.  This is the records and media tab and this is the wine collection tab.  Notable items (mainly the ones discussed below) are highlighted in an unpleasant shade of mint green.  It's even linked up so if you see a company or cohort you're interested in chasing down, you needn't but click.

I also took a whack at estimating the value of wine collection, using Wine Searcher.  No guarantees on the accuracy here (as I have less than zero wine knowledge), but generally speaking, these prices reflect something like the median retail price found for each bottle, as described.  My estimate of the total value is $68,000 (203 bottles), but given the wide price range for the 1982 Lafite alone, that could be low by a few hundred thousand dollars.  Any oenophiles who'd like to weigh in on the estimates, please do.

Anyway, on to the intriguing bits...

New Hsu entity:

Joining Components, Next Components, the only recently discovered Side B, and all the rest is New Equation.  All they found were incorporation documents and [something illegible], but this is pretty clearly another of Hsu's presumed shell companies as it officially shares that 561 7th Avenue address with Side B and Next Components (where none of them are).

New investment firms:

There are two allegedly defrauded investor groups involved in the complaints against Norman Hsu - Source Financing Investors in New York and Briarwood in Orange County.  In Hsu's home, however (in the same location in the same room as his bank statements and incorporation documents), agents found subscription agreements, adviser registrations, and marketing materials for 3 additional firms:

1. Robeco-Sage Capital Management (founded in 1994 by former Goldman Sachs partners)
2. Brentwood Capital (my best guess based on the handwriting - this could say Briarwood Capital, although Briarwood is actually called Briarwood Investors)
3. Marwood Group (site only accessible to investors)

At this point, there's no way to tell how (if at all) these firms or their principals fit into Hsu's world.  They could have invested in Hsu's ostensible apparel deals, much the way Briarwood and SFI did, but are reluctant to come forward.  They could be firms that employ acquaintances of Hsu's who were helping him develop his investor pitch.  Or Hsu could've been using the documents merely as templates of genuine investor materials.  But whatever the relationship, this third firm warrants further examination.

Marwood Group is an investment firm co-founded in 2002 by Edward Kennedy, Jr., son of Senator Ted Kennedy (recipient of nearly $50,000 in Hsu-connected funds) and brother of Rep. Patrick Kennedy (who received nearly $40,000 from Hsu and the gang).  Not surprisingly, many people at the firm make significant contributions to both the Senator and the Congressman.  Some have also given smaller amounts to the likes of George W. Bush, John Boehner, and the RNC, which is behavior we never see among Hsu's alleged straw donors, but since we won't be able to look at the contribution histories of Hsu's allegedly coerced donors (members of his two known investor groups), we don't yet know what their contribution patterns will reveal and can't yet make a good comparison with the Marwood folks.  In the meantime, here are all the federal donations made by those employed at Marwood Group since its founding.

[As a side note, while this may be completely coincidental, it's worth pointing out that the name and phone number of an actress named Shae Kennedy were printed on a recordable DVD retrieved from Hsu's apartment.  Kennedy was in a few films a few years back and now appears to be an assistant to comedian Lewis Black.  I had no luck determining whether she might be a "Kennedy" Kennedy.]

New huge Ponzi scheme:

This isn't so much a "new" scheme as one newly determined to be related to the Hsu case.  And it isn't so much "determined to be related" as it is "speculated by me to be related and kind of a long shot, but interesting enough to warrant discussion."

The seizure inventory refers to a letter from Samuel Somethingorother.  My best guess at what the handwriting was trying to convey was "Kefsal" (decide for yourself - page 4).  Google doesn't like "Kefsal" and instead suggests "Samuel Kelsall".  Samuel Kelsall is an interesting guy.  Samuel Kelsall V, no less, owns a two lawyer firm in Carlsbad, California.  Until 2001, Carlsbad was also home to a financial firm named PinnFund, where Kelsall appears to have served as in-house counsel.

PinnFund was shut down when federal investigators caught wind of a $330 million Ponzi scheme being perpetrated by the firm's principals.  Unlike Hsu's apparel-flavored schemes, PinnFund "invested" in sub-prime mortgages (years ahead of their time, finding their ruin in sub-prime).  Much like the alleged Hsu model, however, PinnFund's m.o. was to take money from their investors, "invest" it in these mortgage pools, and generate handsome (and guaranteed) returns for those investors.  In reality, they blew the money on, among other things:

...homes in Rancho Santa Fe, a yacht, a $31,000 dinner for nine people and a $5,000 tip at Laurel restaurant in San Diego, and...

...wait for it...

...a $5 million home in Laguna Niguel for [CEO Michael Fanghella's] then-girlfriend, a one-time porn star named Kelly Cook.

They shored up the missing principal and the guaranteed returns by recruiting new investors, using their antes to pay off the old, and round and round we go until it all collapses and the investors are left holding the bag.  In this case a very big bag.  A very big, very empty bag.

The Ponzi schemes Norman Hsu is accused of running are massive, weighing in at a combined $63 million.  But at $330 million, PinnFund was a monster, possibly the second largest in history, behind only the Bennett Funding scheme in the mid-1990s.

Samuel Kelsall does not appear to have been charged with any crimes in connection with the PinnFund scam (and he certainly isn't disbarred).  According to the SEC, as reported by San Diego Union-Tribune, both Kelsall and his boss's ex-porn star girlfriend "exercised their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination."  Fanghella made out worst, with