More than eight months after President Barack Obama won the White House, the remnants of his campaign organization is struggling to deal with some unfinished business: returning about $669,000 in tainted or illegal campaign contributions to a motley assortment of donors, among them a convicted murderer, Washington lobbyists and a number of foreign nationals, including his own aunt.
But the 11 Chicago-based staff members still on the campaign’s payroll are finding it was a lot easier to rake in a record-shattering $750 million than to identify and return donations that ran afoul of federal election laws or Obama’s own strict fundraising standards.
Their intensive effort to refund problem contributions has involved detailed research into lobbying records and passport information, an elaborate accounting system that cancels and reissues stale-dated refund checks and phone calls and letters urging donors to cash their refunds. The effort is unprecedented in modern politics, according to election law compliance experts, and underscores both the logistical challenges of processing so much contribution data and the Obama team’s hypersensitivity to anything that could sully the president’s carefully honed image as a crusader against special interests and a champion of ethics and transparency.
Obama’s oft-repeated commitment to those ideals has been a favorite target for critics. During the campaign, they assailed him for breaking a promise to participate in a government financing program intended to reduce the role of fundraising and for lax screening of prohibited contributions from foreign nationals. Since taking office, he’s come under fire for backtracking on his pledge to keep his administration free of lobbyists, whom he vilified during the campaign, and for lending his fundraising clout to groups that usually don’t adhere to the same strict no-lobbyist-cash standard that he imposed on his campaign and on the Democratic National Committee.
A POLITICO analysis of Obama’s most recent finance report showed that between the beginning of April and the end of June, the campaign sent out more than 800 refunds.
It’s not clear from the report which refunds were successfully processed, nor the motivation for every refund. POLITICO’s analysis identified at least 50 refunds totaling more than $27,000 to lobbyists, 40 refunds totaling nearly $28,000 to foreign donors and at least 13 refunds totaling nearly $115,000 to donors who gave more than the $4,600 maximum. The latter group included Robert Hormats, a Goldman Sachs director whom Obama recently nominated to be an undersecretary of state and who had his $2,300 donation returned because the campaign discovered he had already maxed out on how much he could give. - Politico Story
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