Obama's foreign campaign finance contributers

Kenneth Timmerman:

More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won't disclose.

And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as legitimate.

Obama has raised nearly twice that of John McCain's campaign, according to new campaign finance report.

But because of Obama’s high expenses during the hotly contested Democratic primary season and an early decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits it imposes, all that cash has not translated into a financial advantage — at least, not yet.

...

Federal law does not require the campaigns to identify donors who give less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them once they go beyond the $200 mark.

Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200 threshold.

“Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not listed,” said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. “They don’t appear anywhere, so there’s no way of knowing who they are.”

The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified.

It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002.

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The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation for Iran. Another 63 listed it as “UK,” the United Kingdom.

More than 1,400 of the overseas entries clearly were U.S. diplomats or military personnel, who gave an APO address overseas. Their total contributions came to just $201,680.

But others came from places as far afield as Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Beijing, Fallujah, Florence, Italy, and a wide selection of towns and cities in France.

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There is much more in this long expose. A friend in Estonia has sent me one of the solicitation he has received. He is an Estonian who has no tie to the US and was in fact drafted into the Soviet army when it was part of the Soviet Union.

Here is the email he recieved:

...

I've never asked you to make a donation before.

But I'm about to make some major decisions about deploying field staff
and volunteers to key battleground states.

The resources we have on hand going into October will directly impact
our voter registration and Get Out The Vote operations. And now that
early voting has begun in eight states -- including Ohio as of today
-- we need to move as quickly as possible.

Please donate $5 or more before the deadline to help register voters,
get out the vote, and win this election.

We're stretching every dollar and doing everything we can with what we
have. But every day I see firsthand how much more we could do -- and
how far your donation will go.

Thanks for your support,

Jon

Jon Carson
National Field Director
Obama for America

Actually this is not the first email he has received from the Obama campaign. It does tell you how wide spread the Obama solicitation effort is.