Campaign Fundraising - Clinton Style

[FishForLunch]

Hillary Clinton raised big bucks at a Chinatown fund-raiser from donors who listed seemingly modest-paying jobs on contributor forms, prompting an angry exchange between John Edwards' campaign and Team Clinton.

The flap came after the Los Angeles Times reported people holding jobs such as dishwasher, server or chef made donations ranging from $500 to $2,300.

The newspaper said it could not find one-third of the donors using property, telephone or business records.

By mid-afternoon, David Bonior, Edwards' campaign manager, issued a statement that "many Clinton campaign contributions are raising eyebrows again."

Howard Wolfson, a top Clinton adviser, said the campaign does not "ethnically profile donors."

He acknowledged the campaign flagged a number of questionable donations based on occupations and amounts. It returned $7,000 it couldn't confirm was legally given, he said.

As for the Edwards rebuke, Wolfson replied, "If Mr. Edwards is so concerned about campaign finance reform, he should give back the contributions he got from Geoffrey Fieger."

In August, Fieger was indicted on charges of conspiring to make more than $125,000 in illegal donations to Edwards' 2004 presidential campaign. Team Edwards said it will give the money to charity if Fieger is convicted.

Officials from Barack Obama's campaign flatly refused to comment on the controversy, perhaps to avoid any perception that they were promoting the story.

Chung Seto, organizer of an April fund-raiser and former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party, said event planners took "extraordinary measures" to ensure that the donations were lawful.

Insinuations to the contrary are "outrageous" and "racist," she said. "Donors who work hard every day - they are in the restaurant or garment industry - should not be questioned about why they choose to be involved in the political process."

Bo Jie Wu, a money-transfer store employee, told the Daily News he gave $1,000 to Clinton because he believes in her.

Hsiao Yen Wang, a nursing assistant, said it was a "pleasure" for her and her husband, a cook, to give Clinton $1,000 because "I would like to see the United States have the first woman President."

[FishForLunch]

Some Fundraisers With Legal Issues Slip Through Campaigns’ Vetting

By John Solomon and Matthew Mosk
Monday, September 3, 2007; A01

Sant S. Chatwal, an Indian American businessman, has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaigns, even as he battled governments on two continents to escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens.

The founder of the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, Chatwal is one of a growing number of fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign whose backgrounds have prompted questions about how much screening the candidates devote to their “bundlers” while they press to raise record amounts.

Chatwal’s case reached from his native India to New York City. The IRS pursued him for approximately $4 million in unpaid business taxes, while New York state placed a lien seeking more than $5 million in taxes. He forfeited a building to New York City on which he was delinquent on property taxes and was sued by federal regulators seeking to recoup millions of dollars in loans from a failed bank where he served as a director.

Across the ocean, three Indian banks forced him into U.S. bankruptcy, and he was charged with bank fraud. He was out on bond when he showed up in India in 2001 during a visit by his longtime friend Bill Clinton.

Yet none of the legal and financial woes — occasionally touched on in American or Indian newspapers or highlighted by political opponents — raised red flags inside Hillary Clinton’s fundraising operation. Chatwal recently said he plans to help raise $5 million from Indian Americans for Clinton’s presidential bid.

Asked whether anything in Chatwal’s background caused concerns about his activities on behalf of the campaign, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer answered, “No.” He declined last week to be more specific, saying only that major fundraisers are routinely vetted “through publicly available records.” …

Chatwal, after making his millions in the restaurant business, saw his fortunes sour when he began dabbling in New York real estate just as the market softened.

He was forced into bankruptcy in 1995 by three Indian banks that claimed he owed them millions from business loans.

During the 1990s, the IRS and New York City and state tax authorities also pursued liens, and Chatwal worked out deals to pay them back. When the rents from one apartment building he bought no longer covered the real estate taxes, Chatwal turned over the building to New York City to resolve a reported $2 million tax lien, his lawyer said.

In 1997, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. sued Chatwal over his role as a director and a guarantor of unpaid loans at the failed First New York Bank for Business. The government alleged that his loans had “resulted in losses to the bank in excess of $12 million,” and it questioned his claims that he could not repay the debts.

The regulators also questioned why Chatwal continued to rent a spacious penthouse apartment in New York in the midst of his financial turmoil. “The debtor has managed to continue living in luxurious style in the same penthouse apartment he resided in at a time he claimed a net worth of tens of millions of dollars without adequate explanation of how his family’s limited income is able to support such a lifestyle,” the government said in a 1997 filing.

In September 2000, Chatwal hosted a half-million dollar fundraiser at that Upper East Side penthouse for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.

A few months later the FDIC abruptly settled the case, agreeing on Dec. 18, 2000, to let Chatwal pay $125,000 for the loans that it had said caused at least $12 million in losses.

Greene, Chatwal’s lawyer, said he believed that the actual losses caused by the loans were smaller but agreed that the bankruptcy resulted in a much smaller settlement. “He fully intended to pay the bank until the Indian banks involuntarily forced him into bankruptcy,” Greene said…

Just as Chatwal’s U.S. cases were being resolved, Indian authorities in December 2000 charged him with bank fraud. On April 30, 2001, he appeared in a Mumbai court and posted a $32,000 bond, according to court officials there. Chatwal was not under travel restrictions, though, and he went back to New York.

He returned to India a month later and made headlines in Indian newspapers by appearing with Bill Clinton during a visit with earthquake victims. The trip was underwritten by the American India Foundation, where Chatwal’s son was a board member. Aides to the former president said Chatwal was one of about 100 members of the Clinton delegation.

Eventually, Indian authorities “discharged” Chatwal from the bank case and closed the matter, Greene said.

Chatwal’s allegiance to the Clintons never wavered. Earlier this year, he promised to raise $5 million for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, creating a group called Indian Americans for Hillary 2008. Donors who gathered at least $25,000 were promised a “private VIP meeting” with the candidate, fundraising letters show.

The Clintons just have bad luck when it comes to their fundraisers, it would seem.

Surely they check everyone out very thoroughly. But as the article stresses, some mistakes are just going to “slip through” their intense “vetting.”

And who are we to judge?


A few months later the FDIC abruptly settled the case, agreeing on Dec. 18, 2000, to let Chatwal pay $125,000 for the loans that it had said caused at least $12 million in losses

Certainly the Clintons’ influence had no bearing on this. Government debt collectors are famous for accepting pennies on the dollar.

But isn’t it funny how the only people the Washington Post could find to ask about this were a Clintons’ spokesman and Mr. Chatwal’s attorney.

Is this hard-hitting investigative journalism or a preemptive strike to get the Clintons’ defense out before anyone else brought up the obvious subject?

Indeed, even Wikipedia has some very interesting details which were carefully omitted by the Post’s crack reporters:



Sant Chatwal and his wife are greeted by Hillary Clinton at another fundraiser Chatwal hosted for her.

Sant Singh Chatwal
Sant Singh Chatwal is a Sikh Indian-American businessman. According to The Indian Express, “he is a former Indian Air Force pilot who migrated to the United States in the 1980s and started the Bombay Palace chain of restaurants.” …

Chatwal is a Trustee of the William J. Clinton Foundation, a Charitable foundation organized by President Clinton focusing on global issues of health security, economic empowerment (HIV/AIDS Initiative; Clinton Global Initiative, Urban Enterprise Initiative, Healthier Generation, etc.)…

Chatwal has devoted resources to political causes, working very closely with the Democratic Party, in particular with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator John Kerry, Senator Charles Schumer, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Joseph Crowley.

In February 2006, Chatwal hosted an extravagant wedding in India for his son Vikram Chatwal. The wedding including a week of festivities spread out over a week and three Indian cities and a veritable fleet of chartered planes. Guests included Bill Clinton, Lakshmi Mittal, Deepak Chopra and the Prime Minister of India.

Ironically, Sant Chatwal had earlier filed for personal bankruptcy in New York to discharge millions in debt owed to various people and entities including the US government. In court filings in the late 1990s he stated he had just ‘$100’ while living in a penthouse in New York’s expensive upper-Eastside. Among the many banks that saw their loans turn bad were Lincoln Savings Bank, First New York Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bank of India and State Bank of India.

He is now on “Hillary Clinton for President Exploratory Committee”.

[FishForLunch]

Clinton donor wanted by FBI in scheme to funnel money

Robin Fields and Chuck Neubauer,

Los Angeles Times, March 3, 2007

A Pakistani immigrant who hosted fundraisers in Southern California for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is being sought by the FBI on charges that he funneled illegal contributions to Clinton’s political action committee and Sen. Barbara Boxer’s 2004 reelection campaign. Authorities say Northridge businessman Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, fled the country after an indictment accused him of engineering more than $50,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic committees. A business associate charged as a co-conspirator has entered a guilty plea and is scheduled to be sentenced in Los Angeles next week…

The case has transformed Jinnah from a political point man on Pakistani issues, a man often photographed next to foreign dignitaries and U.S. leaders, into a fugitive with his mug shot on the FBI’s "featured fugitives" wanted list. Jinnah’s profile peaked in 2004 and 2005 as he wooed members of Congress to join a caucus advancing Pakistani concerns and brought Clinton to speak to prominent Pakistani Americans, lauding their homeland’s contributions to the war on terrorism and calling relations with Pakistan beneficial to U.S. interests.

Jinnah and his family donated more than $100,000 to the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates. Now friends say they believe Jinnah has returned to Pakistan. Attempts to reach him and his relatives were unsuccessful. A "For Sale" sign stood in his yard on Thursday, and a neighbor said the family had not lived there for months.

Jinnah’s troubles appear to have begun when he attempted to circumvent election laws by reimbursing friends, business contacts and their family members for contributions made in their names, according to court records. Federal statutes set limits on contributions to federal campaigns and political action committees and bar donations made in the names of others. Authorities say that from June 2004 to February 2005, Jinnah directly or indirectly solicited contributions from more than a dozen "conduits," reimbursing them with funds from his company, All American Distributing, a seller of cellphone service and accessories. Authorities said the scheme allowed Jinnah to get around limits then in effect on individual donors of $5,000 per year to PACs and $2,000 per election to candidates, as well as the ban on using corporate money for political donations.

Jinnah’s case has been handled with discretion by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, which recently lost a high-profile case against former Clinton campaign official David Rosen. Rosen was acquitted of charges of filing false reports about a Hollywood fundraiser given for Clinton in 2000…

According to the indictment, Jinnah arranged $30,000 in donations to HillPac by having Schoenburg, a Tarzana television producer, approach family members and others to act as straw donors. Schoenburg and five others contributed $5,000 apiece. Jinnah later reimbursed them with funds from his corporation, prosecutors say. In one instance, authorities allege, Jinnah and Schoenburg agreed to write "production" in a reimbursement check’s memo line, falsely indicating it was payment for production services…

The indictment says Jinnah also found 14 straw donors to give $28,000 to the 2004 reelection campaign of Boxer (D-Calif.). Among the contributors were five employees of Jinnah’s company, Schoenburg and several members of Schoenburg’s family, records show.

[dude1394]

Follow the money... It seems no one but LATimes is really that worried about it. The NYTimes certainly wouldn't put anything on their editorial page as they are openly a democrat support group.