Inside Hsu's bundles of funds

John Fund:

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are fund-raising powerhouses. On Saturday alone, Mr. Obama scooped up $3 million at a gala hosted by Oprah Winfrey. The candidates are happy to tout their cash hauls. Just don't ask them to identify the contributors whose money disgraced donor Norman Hsu delivered to their campaigns.

Both campaigns are donating to charity the limited direct contributions Mr. Hsu made to them. But Mr. Hsu's influence went far deeper. In 2005, he helped host a California fund-raiser for Mr. Obama, where he introduced the senator to Mark Gorenberg, a venture capitalist who is now one of Mr. Obama's biggest fund-raisers.

Mr. Hsu later became one of Mrs. Clinton's top bundlers--powerbrokers who collect many small donations for delivery to candidates. He brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars to her and other Democratic causes. The Wall Street Journal reports that many of the contributions came from "people who had no prior history of political giving or obvious means for paying."

Take the Paw family of Daly City, Calif., which is headed by a mail carrier who makes $49,000 a year. Members of the family have given almost $300,000 to politicians, including Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, since 2004, often on or about the same days that Mr. Hsu gave money. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether any Hsu donors were illegally reimbursed for their contributions.

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But any new disclosure laws wouldn't cover donations made before they're enacted. Mr. Obama is sending letters of inquiry to five donors publicly identified in the media as linked to Mr. Hsu, but his campaign says it doesn't have any records of any other possible Hsu-linked donors, even though Mr. Hsu has told friends he was careful always to let the campaigns know which contributions he had brought in.

As for Mrs. Clinton, her spokesman Howard Wolfson told the Los Angeles Times that she was declining to release the names of her bundled donors. No wonder. The Clinton campaign has been frequently beset by contributors running afoul of the law. Last week, a leading Clinton supporter and fund-raiser in New Jersey, Mayor Samuel Rivera of Passaic, was arrested on bribery charges in an FBI sting operation. In March, businessman Abdul Rehman "Ray" Jinnah fled the country after being indicted on charges he funneled illegal contributions to Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats.

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Suddenly fund raising is not something the Democrats want to brag about.

In fact they would like to change the subject if they could, but pushing for campaign finance reform is not likely to be as good a distraction this go round. While reporters keep the heat on the candidates to disclose whose contribution was bundled by Hsu and other questionable bundlers, the FBI should be looking at the banking records of the contributors and putting together a flow of funds chart that will discover illegal donations.

They owe it to the country to get this done before the election.