After days of tortured explanations of why her campaign would hold onto bundled donations from Norman Hsu even after donating his direct contributions to charity, Hillary Clinton finally announced that her campaign would return Hsu's funneled money to their donors.Her campaign also announced how much money that would involve, and it turned out to be many times more than first thought:
captainsquartersblog.com, Sept 11 2007
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign announced tonight that it would return approximately $850,000 to about 260 donors who had been recruited or tapped by Norman Hsu, the disgraced Clinton campaign fundraiser who recently fled arrest and is now under investigation for his fundraising practices.
The Clinton campaign also disclosed tonight that it had decided to begin running criminal background checks on its bundlers — the dozens of individuals who raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors on behalf of a candidate, as Mr. Hsu had done for Mrs. Clinton. A Clinton adviser said that “vigorous additional vetting” of the bundlers, including the criminal checks, would begin this week, and that the campaign was hiring additional staff for that purpose. ....
At the end of June, Mrs. Clinton had about $45 million on hand for her presidential campaign; the loss of $850,000 amounts to less than 2 percent of that sum, but, her advisers say, it is a relatively sizable amount that would have been welcomed for the expensive television advertising purchases ahead.
One cheer for Hillary for doing the right thing, even if she did it days too late to undo much of the damage Hsu inflicted on her campaign. In one fell swoop, Hsu revived memories of the 1996 campaign and the fundraising scandal involving Chinese influence. The last thing Hillary needed was a reminder of the scandals that surrounded her husband, especially one that involved foreign governments potentially corrupting an American presidential election.
Now, though, we know why Hillary and her team showed so much reluctance to return the money. Hsu's fundraising for Hillary had earlier been estimated at around $150K, but the near-million figure gives a much better indication of the scale Hsu's efforts reached. It puts a dent in Hillary's liquidity at a time when she'll want to start ramping up advertising efforts. However, her money advantage will remain quite secure even with the 2% loss.
It makes it even more important to find the source of Hsu's funds. Who wanted to put that kind of money into Hillary's campaign, and why? Someone expected to profit from this scheme, and it apparently wasn't the com man who ran it. |
