Top Ten Felons, Fugitives, and Shady Characters in
Obama's Life
Now that the increasingly erratic and desperately sleazy Obama campaign has decided to cavalierly throw around the word "felony" when it comes to pushing a campaign of lies surrounding Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, this seems like a good time to jump in the wayback machine for a look at the actual convicted felons, criminals, and dubious characters that have always been associated with Barack Obama's political life.
What? What's that? You don’t want to talk
about this?
Objection overruled, Corrupt Media!
The President opened this door, and now
we're going to walk right on through it.
Starting with…
1. Former Illinois
Governor Rod Blagojevich: Sentenced to
14 years in prison for political corruption.
President Barack Obama's chief of staff,
then a congressman in Illinois,
apparently attempted to trade favors with embattled Illinois Gov. Rod
Blagojevich while he was in office, according to newly disclosed e-mails
obtained by The Associated Press.
Emanuel agreed to sign a letter to the
Chicago Tribune supporting Blagojevich in the face of a scathing editorial by
the newspaper that ridiculed the governor for self-promotion. Within hours,
Emanuel's own staff asked for a favor of its own: The release of a delayed $2
million grant to a school in his district.
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2. Tony Rezko: Sentenced to 10 and a half years for corruption and
kickbacks.
Rezko raised money for Obama when he ran
for Illinois
senator, but not during his presidential campaign, the AP noted.
Obama also involved Rezko in a house deal
after he was elected to the U.S. Senate, a move he later called “a boneheaded
mistake,” according to a 2008 report in ABC News.
Obama wanted to purchase a home that the
seller had a specific condition on: the adjacent empty lot to the house had to
be purchased at the same time, ABC News reported. In the house deal, Rezko’s
wife paid the full asking price for that parcel, $625,000.
Obama shelled out $300,000 under the
house’s asking price, paying $1.65 million, according to ABC News. Obama then
purchased a part of Rezko’s lot for $104,500.
“It was a mistake to have been engaged with
him at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him,
or anyone else, to believe he had done me a favor,” Obama told the Sun-Times at
the time.
Obama said his connection to Rezko was
“above board and legal.”
Rezko and others connected to him gave
Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign more than $120,000, ABC News reported.
While Rezko's wife paid the full asking
price for the land, Obama paid $300,000 under the asking price for the house.
The house sold for $1,650,000 and the price Rezko's wife paid for the land was
$625,000.
Obama denies there was anything unusual
about the price disparity. He says the price on the house was dropped because
it had been on the market for some time but that the price for the adjacent
land remained high because there was another offer.
Obama then expanded his property by buying
a strip of the Rezko land for $104,500, which the senator maintains was a fair
market price.
Obama later told the Chicago Sun-Times,
"It was a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or any
other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to
believe he had done me a favor."
Obama had known Rezko long before the house
deal, calling him a "friend."
An ABC News review of campaign records
shows Rezko, and people connected to him, contributed more than $120,000 to
Obama's 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate, much of it at a time when Rezko was
the target of an FBI investigation.
It's important to keep in mind that this
was dutiful reporting from the media. Any attempts to turn this into the
Bain-style narrative it deserved and still deserves to be has always been
blunted by the media. This is the shadiest land deal involving a politician in
my lifetime and Obama got away with it legally and politically.
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3. Courtney Dupree: Democratic fundraiser convicted of bank fraud.
Dupree, who attended the elite Wharton
School of Business, was a rainmaker in Democratic circles.
In 2008, Dupree hosted a $1,000-a-ticket
fund-raiser for Barack Obama at his Broad
St. apartment that was attended by top aide
Valerie Jarrett.
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4. Willie Shepherd: Obama bundler plead guilty to assault.
On Tuesday, Shepherd was sentenced to 12
months of supervised probation, according to state court documents.
Shepherd, the former finance co-chairman of
the Democratic National Convention host committee, was originally charged with
negligent child abuse and third-degree assault that knowingly caused injury — a
class one misdemeanor. Those charges were dismissed and Shepherd pleaded guilty
to the class two misdemeanor.
Shepherd, 44, the former finance
co-chairman of the Democratic National Convention host committee and
$100,000-plus bundler for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, pleaded
not guilty to the charges last month at a Denver
court hearing.
Denver police on Sept. 13 were called to Shepherd's house by his wife, Sarah
Trainor-Shepherd, who said she had been the victim of domestic violence,
according to the arrest affidavit.
The court document says police officers
noticed a red mark on her brow and bruises on her face and arm, but
Trainor-Shepherd then told police she did not want to press charges.
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5. John Corzine: Top Obama fundraiser currently under FBI investigation.
Obama's "Wall Street guy."
Jon Corzine, now the center of an FBI
investigation into the handling of hundreds of millions of dollars invested in
his securities firm, was one of the leading Wall Street fundraisers for
President Obama’s campaign and suggested to investors that he might take a top
administration post if the president were re-elected.
His new legal troubles, sparked by the
bankruptcy filing of his investment firm, MF Global, could complicate the
president’s efforts to raise money from the financial community given Corzine’s
central role in those efforts.
A recent list of top “bundlers” or elite
fundraisers released by Obama’s campaign listed Corzine in the highest category
-- reporting that he had raised more than $500,000 for the campaign. A
substantial chunk of those funds were collected at a $35,800 per ticket
fundraiser that Corzine hosted at his wife’s spacious Fifth Avenue apartment
last April -- an event that was touted at the time as part of a concerted
effort by the president’s campaign team to reach out to well-heeled Wall Street
donors who had been alienated by some of his policies and previous public
comments.
In a sign of his emerging role as a
financial guru for Barack Obama, Gov. Jon Corzine Sunday unveiled the latest
piece of the presidential candidate's plan to curb soaring oil prices.
The governor touted an Obama proposal that
marked the latest clash between the Democrat and Republican opponent John
McCain over energy policy, as voters rank the economy as their biggest concern
heading into the November election.
In his plan, Obama calls for more
regulation in oil markets by promising to close the so-called "Enron
loophole" that exempts some energy trading from federal oversight. The
rollout also provided a showcase for Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs CEO whom
Obama referred to as "our Wall Street guy" at a meeting of Democratic
governors in Chicago
on Friday.
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6. Shervin Neman: Obama bundler currently under investigation for fraud.
The Obama campaign will return the
donations of an accused Ponzi schemer who is facing an SEC investigation, a
campaign official confirms.
"With 1.8 million donors thus far, we
constantly review those contributions for issues. In this particular case, we
will be refunding the contributions and have placed the funds in escrow until a
trusteeship or other appropriate place to return these funds is established
given the interests of the investors," a campaign official told POLITICO.
Shervin Neman, a hedge fund manager in Los Angeles, stands
accused by the SEC of defrauding members of his California Persian-Jewish
community, the conservative Washington Free Beacon reports.
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7. Abake Assongba: Obama bundler under investigation for fraud.
New Yorker Abake Assongba has pledged to
help President Obama win reelection, and as one of his 400 volunteer
fundraisers, she has delivered $50,000 to the cause.
But she is also trailed by some
controversy, accused in court of defrauding a businessman out of $657,000,
impersonating a bank official and dodging creditors.
Assongba disputes the allegations, but the
mysteries around her personal life highlight a challenge for Obama’s reelection
effort and other presidential campaigns. The astronomical cost of running for
the White House requires an army of bundlers, many of whom are strangers to the
campaign. And as candidates quickly learn, it is no small task to woo — and vet
— those citizen fundraisers.
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8. Alberto and Carlos
Cardona: Obama bundlers with ties to a Mexican
fugitive accused of attempted assassinations.
The Obama campaign will return more than
$200,000 in campaign donations from the American relatives of a fugitive
Mexican businessman and casino owner, a campaign official said Tuesday.
“On the basis of the questions that have
been raised, we will return the contributions from these individuals and from
any other donors they brought to the campaign,” said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman
for the campaign.
The fugitive, Juan Jose Rojas “Pepe”
Cardona, fled drug charges and other legal troubles in Iowa in 1994 and rose to prominence as a
wealthy Mexican casino operator. State Department reports have also linked him
as a suspect in attempted assassinations of business rivals and illegal
political donations in Mexico.
According to a story first reported by The
New York Times, Pepe Cardona’s American brothers have suddenly emerged as major
Democratic donors — raising and contributing up to $300,000 to the Obama
campaign alone, mostly from relatives. The donations put one brother, Alberto
Rojas Cardona, in the top bracket of Obama campaign volunteer fundraisers,
known as bundlers.
According to the Times, another brother,
Carlos Cardona, has also been approaching political figures — including a
former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party and a former governor of Iowa — trying to seek a
pardon for his brother Pepe Cardona.
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9. Solyndra: First company to receive taxpayer backed loans from
Obama. Solyndra's investors are Obama bundlers. The FBI raided Solyndra last
September.
The Obama Administration loaned over $500
million to Solyndra via an accelerated process; later, of course, Solyndra went
bankrupt and had to fire 1,100 employees. Some of Solyndra’s biggest
stakeholders were major Obama donors – George Kaiser, an Oklahoma billionaire,
raised between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2008; Steve Westly, an Obama bundler,
was linked with Solyndra; so was Steve Spinner, another Obama fundraiser, who
pushed the Administration to greenlight the loan, even while his wife’s law
firm was legally representing the company.
An FBI raid on Solyndra Inc., a solar-panel
maker that failed after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S.
Energy Department, may signal the escalation of a probe into the Obama
administration’s clean- energy program.
Agents for Energy Department Inspector
General Gregory Friedman, who has called the department’s clean-energy loan
program lacking in “transparency and accountability,” joined in the search
yesterday at the Fremont, California, headquarters of Solyndra, which
filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6.
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10. Bill Ayers: Unrepentant domestic terrorist. Early Obama backer.
Fellow board-member of the Woods Foundation. 4th of July pal.
As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack
Obama disavowed any connection with former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the
Weather Underground radical who was one of Obama's early backers and his
colleague on the board of the Woods Fund in Chicago. We now have proof that Obama's
association with Ayers continued even after Obama had been elected to represent
Illinois in
the U.S. Senate--in the form of a now-scrubbed blog post placing Obama at the
home of Ayers and his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, on July 4, 2005.
Dr. Tom Perrin, Assistant Professor of
English at Huntingdon College in Montgomery,
Alabama, was a graduate student at the University of Chicago at the time, and maintained a
blog called "Rambling Thomas." He lived next door to Ayers and Dohrn
in Hyde Park. He wrote at 8:44 a.m. on July 6,
2005:
Guess what? I spent the 4th of July evening
with star Democrat Barack Obama! Actually, that's a lie. Obama was at a barbecue
at the house next door (given by a law professor who is a former member of the
Weather Underground) and we saw him over the fence at our barbecue. Well, the
others did. It had started raining and he had gone inside be the time I got
there. Nevertheless.
Dohrn is a Clinical Associate Professor of
Law at Northwestern University, and Chicago
did, in fact, record rainfall on the Fourth of July holiday in 2005.
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We all know the media will refuse to vet
Obama's sordid past until he's safely out of office. But other than Ayers,
every convicted felon and person under investigation listed here was a part of
Obama's political life while he was president or running for president.
In the case of domestic terrorist Bill
Ayers, he and Obama enjoyed that barbecue together in 2005, when Obama was only
a United States Senator.
Do You See A Trend Here Or Is It Just Me... Can you imagine the damage these crooks have done to our country. What a sad legacy we are leaving and just wait until OHBummer get out and the truth starts to roll out. Shame on the Media for not doing their job.
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