Staff Had Offered to Go Without Pay to Save Campaign Money But Never Did

So it turns out the Clinton campaign may not be so cash-strapped after all  at least not at this very moment.

After offering on Wednesday to go without paychecks to help save precious campaign resources, senior staff members on Hillary Clinton’s campaign are in fact not going without pay during the month of February, ABC News has learned.

"It’s not happening," said a source familiar with the situation.

Clinton’s campaign has been shouting from the rooftops all day about its online fundraising efforts since Super Tuesday.

Clinton’s Money

The campaign announced today that it raised more than four million dollars online in the 24 hours after polls closed on Tuesday  the biggest single haul in one day ever for the campaign.

"We are gratified for this tremendous outpouring of support," said Clinton Campaign Internet Director Peter Daou.

That outpouring is the reason that a handful of senior staff who had offered to go without pay on Wednesday have been told today that they will not need to skip paychecks.

One longtime Democratic consultant not affiliated with any campaign wondered if perhaps the whole thing wasn’t a big stunt to garner media attention and look like an "underdog."

"I’d take this revelation as a sign that they planned this whole thing," the consultant said.

The source familiar with the situation also believes Senator Clinton will not need to loan herself any more cash. On Wednesday it was revealed that Hillary Clinton had given her campaign an infusion of $5 million back in January.

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In the beginning, everyone assumed that the Clinton machine would dominate fundraising in the Democratic primary. Although it raised prodigious sums of money, Barack Obama managed to keep pace all through 2007. Now, as Obama has also kept pace with Hillary in delegate counts, the Clinton machine appears to have begun running dry:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced yesterday that she had lent her campaign $5 million, a remarkable twist for a candidate who raised more than $100 million last year that came as she and Sen. Barack Obama continued to spar over which of them was the Democratic winner in coast-to-coast Super Tuesday balloting. …

At her campaign headquarters in Arlington, Clinton defended her maneuver, executed last month but kept under wraps until yesterday, to add money to her campaign coffers. News of the $5 million transfer came as a surprise to Clinton donors who had assumed her campaign, which raised $100 million last year, would keep pace with Obama’s. Earlier this month, Obama announced that he had raised $32 million in January alone, and aides said he took in an additional $3.5 million yesterday. …

It was unclear whether news of Clinton’s financial stresses would affect her fundraising. Top fundraisers said they did not learn of her move until after Super Tuesday’s contests, suggesting that the campaign was aware it could be a public relations blow.

Hillary raised $13 million in January, much less than half of Obama’s total. She now faces the prospect of a tour through Obama’s territory with no lead in delegates and a huge gap in financing. The money gap could tamp down her advertising and event staging, leaving a clear field for Obama in Maryland, Virginia, Louisiana, and Nebraska. Even Washington DC and Washington state look grim.

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Five mil in the red, senior staff working gratis, and another monster month of fundraising for the Messiah coming down the pike. Given his other advantages — likeability, oratorical, and a swell of support within the party establishment — I’m starting to think if she holds him off it’ll be an even more impressive comeback than Maverick’s was. How confident is he? He’s going after the Clenis now.

Dean-o’s already talking about a deal to avoid a convention battle. Whom to choose? The guy who raises $30 million a month? Or the gal who can’t pay her bills? If you’re the praying sort, you’d better pray for something like an 80% crossover by Republicans in those open primaries.

A reprise from last night, partly because I dig it and partly because it fits.

Source: Hot Air

In keeping with the Clinton family tradition of proudly accepting cash from the shadiest of sources, Hillary Clinton has raised more money from lobbyists than any other presidential candidate—Democrat or Republican.

The former First Lady took $823,097 from registered lobbyists and members of their firms last year, nearly double the amount of the second-biggest recipient (Republican presidential candidate John McCain) who accepted $416,321 from lobbyists in 2007.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama, Clinton’s incredibly strong rival for the Democratic nomination, doesn’t take cash from registered lobbyists but he did accept nearly $100,000 from employees of firms that do quite a bit of lobbying.

Clinton took the money even though she, along with other presidential candidates, vowed to quash special interests. In fact, during a debate last month the New York senator insisted that she won’t be swayed by her support from lobbyists, saying that she withstood the “full force of corporate lobbyists” while working on her disastrous universal health care plan in the 1990s.

In addition to accepting big bucks from the lobbyists themselves, huge sums are also bundled for Clinton which means the lobbyists raise money from other sources and bring it to her campaign. Not surprisingly, Clinton refuses to disclose which donations are brought in by lobbyist bundlers.

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On Thursday, all the Presidential candidates had to file their campaign finance disclosures for the fourth quarter of 2007.  I gave the frontrunners’ reports a quick scour both to get an updated read on the money race (summary statistics here) and to hunt for any fresh instances of the irregularities that have made this cycle so engaging in the past.

So far, one schedule has made a special impression: Senator Clinton’s Itemized Receipts, Line 21.

Excerpted from the filing:

Line 21 is typically very boring, generally nothing more than interest income on bank deposits.  But it’s also where candidates report income they’ve generated by selling, renting, or trading their contributor lists.  The practice is compliant with FEC rules - you just don’t see it too often because it’s liable to anger the tens of thousands of people who parted with their hard earned cash to support a candidate they probably didn’t expect to (literally) sell them out.

But the problem here is not that the Clinton campaign decided (for the first time) to engage in the practice.  The problem is the customer.

Walter Karl, Inc. is your typical list broker/junk mail company, with the exception of the identity of its parent company, infoUSA.

Alert readers will recall that the founder, chairman, CEO, and controlling shareholder of this public company is Vinod Gupta, a man with an impressive record of alleged improprieties involving funneling shareholders’ money to the Clintons.

When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company’s private jet to fly them there.

The company, infoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events.

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Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a national co-chair of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, banked at least $7,500 in political donations linked to an indicted Chicago businessman whose past connections to Barack Obama have been used by Clinton to criticize her rival.

City records show Antoin Rezko, idenfitied as chairman of Rezmar Corp. of Chicago, contributed $1,000 to Villaraigosa’s mayoral campaign in May 2001. Those records show Rezko also donated $500 to another Villaraigosa political committee in March 2003.

Records show Villaraigosa received at least another $6,000 from people or businesses with connections to Rezko.

Asked to confirm whether the mayor received donations from Rezko, spokesman Sean Clegg said "the contributions are currently under review."

Clegg said Villaraigosa doesn’t know Rezko and was unaware whether Rezko or any of his companies were doing business with the city, or bidding on city contracts.

"The contributions from 2001 and 2003 were long before any issues related to Tony Rezko became public," Clegg said.

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By Monica Crowley 

Once upon a time, there was a Mythical First Black President who held court with his white Wife. They lorded over the land, until he was impeached and she bolted for the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Today, the Mythical First Black President is trying to help the Wife beat the Candidate who could be the Actual First Black President.

The Wife launched the first racial salvo, when she suggested that all Martin Luther King, Jr. did for civil rights was to "make speeches." To reinforce the point, she said, "It took a president (Lyndon Johnson) to get it done." Meaning: it was swell that King made some speeches and stuff, but it took the white guy in power to make it happen.

The Mythical First Black President then disrupted his welcome in Black Presidentville with a cranky tantrum: the campaign of the Candidate was "the biggest fairy tale" he’d ever seen.

Blacks around the country took offense that their Mythical Leader would dismiss the actual black candidate as a fantasy, so the Mythical First Black President took to the airwaves to try to clarify: he meant that the Candidate’s position on Iraq was a "fairy tale," not his candidacy. Most black audiences weren’t buying what the MFBP was selling this time.

Meanwhile, the Wife claimed that while the Candidate was an "inspirational speaker" (shorthand for a great preacher), he hadn’t "put in the spade work to be president."

The Rev. Al Sharpton must be too busy admiring his "Destroying Don Imus Award" to notice.

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Last November, I wrote about the case of Hillary Clinton backer Mauricio Celis, whose ownership of a law practice resulted in an indictment containing charges of impersonating a lawyer and fraudulent business practices. Now the state of Texas has a new investigation of Celis which includes money laundering and suspected involvement in Mexican drug cartels:

Mauricio Celis is linked to the Mexican drug trade in a search warrant the state used Friday to raid his law offices and gather computer files, according to financial documents and other business records. The warrant includes a sworn statement by a Texas Attorney General’s official accusing Celis of money laundering. …

The state searched a U.S. Treasury database and border crossing data to determine that Celis went to Mexico frequently after withdrawing large sums of cash, according to an affidavit accompanying the warrant.

"Celis is rumored to be associated with questionable criminal element (sic) possibly related to drug trafficking," the affidavit states.

The affidavit, by Capt. Alex Pena of the Attorney General’s Office, states that Pena "believes that Mauricio Celis has committed the felony offense of money laundering."

A document the state obtained from Frost Bank showed a joint account signed by Celis and Raul Armando Winder, a Mexican citizen and former police officer who has been employed as a pilot by individuals linked to narcotic trafficking, according to the affidavit. The account was for a business called Pegasus Air Services, which Celis owned from 2002-05, according to the Texas Secretary of State. Winder is listed as vice president on the bank application.

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Disgraced political donor Norman Hsu was sentenced Friday to three years in prison after a judge refused to throw out his 1992 no-contest plea to fraud.

Hsu’s lawyers had asked Judge Stephen Hall to dismiss his 16-year-old plea, arguing that Hsu’s right to speedy justice was violated because authorities were not actively pursuing him during his years as a fugitive. They could easily have arrested Hsu, his lawyers argued, at one of the fundraisers he hosted in California for prominent local politicians.

Hsu also faces federal fraud charges in New York.

His troubles began dogging Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and other big-name Democrats last summer when news reports revealed he was a fugitive who fled the state before he was sentenced for the 1992 fraud conviction for scamming investors out of $1 million.

He turned himself in on Aug. 31, posted $2 million in bail, then fled again, skipping a scheduled court appearance.

He was recaptured in September in Colorado after he tried to kill himself by overdosing on drugs aboard an eastbound Amtrak train. Hsu has since been held without bail in a Redwood City jail.

Hsu lawyer James Brosnahan said his client will appeal the sentence as well as the judge’s refusal to toss out the case.

Public records show Hsu lavished millions in campaign contributions on a host of candidates since 2003. He also attended many well-publicized fundraisers, including several in Northern California.

Hall also refused to let Hsu withdraw his no-contest plea because his "failure to appear was completely within his control," and ordered half of the $2 million Hsu posted as bail be turned over to federal authorities for possible victim restitution there. The other half will be used to reimburse the victims of Hsu’s first scam.

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The NY Sun might as well have asked: Would you like some cheese?

Now that Mayor Bloomberg is getting ready to spend hundreds of millions — maybe even more than a billion — of his own dollars on a presidential run that, if executed properly, would take the electoral votes of New York and California and Florida and Massachusetts out of the Hillary Clinton column and into the Michael Bloomberg column, President Clinton is suddenly coming down with the fantods about the dangers of self-financed political campaigns.

“We are very frustrated because we have a Supreme Court that seems determined to say that the wealthier have more right to free speech than the rest of us,” President Clinton said in Iowa on Sunday, according to Politico, complaining that such spending violates “the spirit of campaign finance reform.”

“…the rest of us.” Bill Clinton has become filthy rich since leaving the presidency. These days he’s always seen in the company of the world’s power elite, people who can write multi-million dollar checks to his library fund. For him to talk about “the rest of us” as though he’s not among the world’s upper crust is, as usual, a shameless lie.

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