And the Beat Goes On...
By Paul R' Hollrah
DrRichSwier.com
In an October 2008 column titled “Obama
is Bought, but Who Owns Him?” we disclosed what
should have become the nation’s largest ever
campaign finance scandal.
Just days earlier, Obama had boasted that his
fundraising base had increased by 1.0 million
people, from 1.5 million to 2.5 million in the five
month period between May and October, and that the
total amount raised approached $600 million.
This represented a significant increase from his May
31, 2008, report when he claimed that one-fourth of
his $265 million, or $66.26 million, came from those
contributing $2,000, or more… some 33,200 people.
If we can assume that, as of October 2008, 25% of
his contributions still came from individuals giving
$2,000 to $2,300, that major contributor base would
have grown from 33,200 to 65,200 people in a time
span of just five months.
While it is true that Obama is the kind of guy who
could read Bill Clinton’s golf scorecard off a
teleprompter and make it sound convincing, simple
arithmetic should have told him that 75% of his
October total, or $450 million, could not be
contributed by 2.44 million people in “$5, $10, or
$20” amounts, or whatever they could afford,” as
Obama assured us. Each of those 2.44 million
people would have had to contribute, on average,
$185 to create a pool of $450 million, and that
simply does not happen. It has never happened
before in American politics and it did not
happen in 2008.
So what was the truth of the matter? In our
July 25, 2008 column, and again in our October 21,
2008 column, we pointed out that UBS Americas,
headed by Robert Wolf… along with George Soros, one
of Obama’s top two money men… had been accused of
highly unethical and illegal banking practices in
six months of hearings by the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations. According to
an article in The Nation, UBS Americas, a
subsidiary of UBS, of Zurich, Switzerland, had
advised wealthy Americans, including many of our
most unwholesome characters, how to shelter funds
from the IRS, as well as from prosecutors,
creditors, business associates, family members, and
each other.
In a Statement of Facts in the criminal trial of
former UBS executive Bradley Birkenfeld, it was
alleged that UBS took extraordinary steps to help
American clients manage their Swiss accounts without
alerting federal authorities. For
example, UBS advised American clients to avoid
detection by using Swiss credit cards to withdraw
funds, to destroy all existing off-shore banking
records, and to misrepresent the receipt of funds
from their Swiss accounts as loans from the
Swiss bank. According to The Nation,
UBS established an elaborate training program which
taught bank employees how to avoid surveillance by
U.S. Customs and law enforcement, falsify visas,
encrypt communications, and secretly move money into
and out of the country… ”
It was the perfect instrument for funneling illegal
campaign contributions into the coffers of an
unscrupulous American politician. Putting two
and two together, I suggested that a very wealthy
individual, a cartel, or an Islamic terrorist group,
wishing to influence the outcome of a U.S.
presidential election, could transfer unlimited sums
of money through this device. A U.S.
recipient, such as the Obama campaign, could have
received tens of thousands of illegal foreign
contributions via Swiss credit card transfers, with
names, addresses, etc. of bogus contributors…
“borrowed” from the campaign’s list of $10 and $20
contributors… being entered by teams of staffers
working in a “boiler room” setting. The owners
of the Swiss accounts would receive periodic
statements indicating: a) debits of varying amounts,
up to $2,300 each, and b) offsetting credits
provided by the cartel, or by the wealthy, but
unnamed, “international financier.”
For most of the super wealthy, especially those
attempting to hide income and assets from U.S.
authorities, an unexplained debit and credit of
$2,300, or less, would not even raise an eyebrow.
They would assume that a bank employee had simply
made a data entry mistake, followed by an immediate
correction. They would have no way of knowing
that a sum of money had actually been withdrawn from
their account and contributed to the Obama campaign,
with a like amount deposited in the account by an
illegal foreign source… the entire transaction
facilitated by a high-ranking bank employee.
So who would ever know the source of such
contributions?
In an October 20, 2008, article in Newsmax,
writer Kenneth Timmerman provided details from
Federal Election Commission records that gave
substantial weight to my theory. In studying
Obama’s FEC filings, Newsmax found more
than 2,000 donors who had given substantially more
than their $4,600 limit ($2,300 in the primaries and
$2,300 in the General Election). The law
requires that such excess contributions must be
returned to the donor within 60 days. However,
many of the donors contacted by Newsmax
said that they had not made those large
contributions to Obama. They had not been
contacted by the Obama campaign, nor had they
received refunds.
What
Newsmax found in studying
Obama’s FEC filings were some 66,383 highly
suspicious contributions, from 37,265 donors, in
which contributions were not rounded to even dollar
amounts. For example, Timmerman reported that
an insurance agent from Burr Ridge, Illinois, gave a
total of $8,724.26. He gave in odd amounts
such as $188.67, $1,542.06, $876.09, $388.67,
$282.20, $195.66, $118.15, and one of $2,300.
A self-employed caregiver in Los Angeles made 36
separate contributions totaling $7,051.12.
Thirteen of her contributions were later refunded.
However, in an odd coincidence those 13 refunds, in
amounts such as $233.88 and $201.44, came to an even
$2,300, the maximum amount allowable in any one
election.
One contributor interviewed by Newsmax, a
retired schoolteacher from Rockledge, Florida, gave
a reported $13,800… $9,200 over his limit.
However, the contributor did not remember giving
that much money to Obama, nor has anyone from the
campaign ever contacted him about a refund.
Of the 66,383 contributions in odd amounts, 44,410
were in unrounded amounts of less than $100, 15,269
contributions were in unrounded amounts of between
$101 and $999, and 704 contributions were in odd
amounts greater than $1,000. Lest anyone
suggest that those 37,265 donors either emptied
their piggy banks or emptied their pockets and
purses periodically and just sent it all to Obama,
pennies and all, allow me to suggest something a bit
more Machiavellian. Those 66,383 contributions
were the proceeds of foreign currency conversions,
smuggled into the country in foreign credit card
receipts, and converted to U.S. dollars.
According to Newsmax, the Obama campaign
finance reports contained some 370,500 unique names…
a far cry from the 2.5 million contributor base
claimed by the campaign. Of course, when your
money is coming in large chunks from offshore
accounts, such as hundreds of thousands of dollars
at a time from the Middle East and from Third World
African countries, then laundered though UBS
accounts in Zurich, it takes a bit of creativity to
put authentic-sounding names on all of it for the
FEC records.
But now there is new evidence that UBS continues to
be a Democrat Party playpen. The Wall
Street Journal reports that, in early 2009,
shortly after being sworn in as U.S. Secretary of
State, Hillary Clinton flew to Geneva where she met
with the Swiss foreign minister. The purpose
of the meeting was to discuss the status of an IRS
lawsuit against UBS in which the IRS was attempting
to obtain the identities of Americans with secret
Swiss bank accounts… under normal circumstances, a
matter that would be negotiated by the U.S. Treasury
Department.
The Swiss foreign minister insisted that, if the IRS
case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank could
face prosecution on both sides of the Atlantic,
either facing criminal charges in U.S. courts, or in
Swiss courts for violating Swiss bank secrecy laws.
According to the Journal report, a few
months after the meeting, Clinton reported a
tentative settlement. As part of the deal, UBS
agreed to give up information on 4,450 American
account holders, out of a total of more than 52,000
accounts containing an estimated $18 billion in
untaxed cash. This amounted to roughly 8.6
percent of the total number of accounts sought by
the IRS. But what is so unusual about the
Clinton-negotiated settlement is that:
-
In the wake of the negotiations,
total UBS contributions to the Clinton
Foundation increased from less than $60,000
through 2008, to a cumulative total of $600,000
by the end of 2014;
-
UBS joined the Clinton Foundation in
creating a pilot entrepreneurship program in
which the bank agreed to provide some $32
million in business loan guarantees;
-
UBS agreed to underwrite a $100,000
charity golf tournament; and,
-
UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton a
$1.5 million honorarium, the largest since he
left the White House, “to participate in a
series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS
Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann.”
As might be expected, the Journal reports
that they could find “no evidence” of a direct
link between Hillary Clinton’s involvement in
the case and the bank’s donations to the Clinton
Foundation, nor to its hiring of her husband for a
$1.5 million series of informal chats with a bank
executive.
Just as the Obama campaign was able to cover its
tracks in 2008 when the UBS Bank appeared to be
complicit in helping the campaign smuggle many
millions of dollars in illegal contributions into
the country, it appears as if the Clintons have been
milking the same Swiss Bank in their unending quest
for wealth, power, and fame. And the beat goes
on… and on, and on.