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celticlord2112 -> RE: Obama's Foreign Donors (8/15/2008 7:42:31 AM)
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Interestingly enough, no one has spoken to the first paragraph of the article I linked in my OP:
quote:
I have been researching, documenting and studying thousands upon thousands of Obama's campaign donations for the past month. Egregious abuse was immediately evident and I published the results of my ongoing investigation. Each subsequent post built a more damning case against Obama's illegal contribution activity.
The author's assertion is that she has looked at primary materials detailing Obama's campaign contributions.
This statement can be either true or it can be false. There is not a third alternative.
The author must either be telling the truth or she must be telling a lie. There is not a third alternative.
Factcheck.org does not have, so far as I can determine, an article which addresses the particular issues raised by the author. Nor does Snopes.com (which is generally quite useful for debunking urban legends). At this time, those sites do not speak to these issues.
The $33,500 figure has been reported on Washington Wire, a blogging site by reporters of the Wall Street Journal. The posting author there, Glenn R. Simpson, is verifiably an award-winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Regardless of Ms Geller's "kookiness", the incident she details can be independently verified.
Her other Obama blog entries include scans of documents she presents as letters from the Federal Election Commission to the Obama campaign detailing various shortcomings in their contribution reporting, as well as the Obama campaigns responses. If these letters are genuine, they document repeated requests by the FEC for information regarding contributions to the Obama campaign that appear to be in excess of statutory limits. If these letters are not genuine, they are outright forgeries and the author is perpetrating a fraud by their dissemination. These are primary source documents, on what is presented as FEC letterhead--as with her opening assertion, they are either true or false, real or genuine. There is not a third alternative.
The Federal Election Commission's own web site shows Obama's campaign not having recorded employer information for most of the millions of contributions that have been received--keep in mind that by law once a person contributes more than $200 to a candidate during an election cycle, employer and other identifying information must be reported to the FEC. Some of the "employers" listed in Obama's reports published online by the FEC read like street addresses--if those entries are in fact street addresses and not business names, that is an error in the report itself, even if the related contributions are themselves made legally. Such "technical errors" in the reports themselves would raise a valid credibility question about the reports as a whole, and, were one to audit the reports along with the underlying accounting processes, the presence of such inaccuracies would be cause for a more thorough scrutiny of the supporting records and documentation--which the purported letters from the FEC to the Obama campaign which the author posts in her blog show taking place.
Regardless of the "kookiness" of the messenger, these are factual assertions. They are either true or false. Her primary materials are either legitimate or forgeries, making her blog either an honest report or a damned lie and vicious fraud. It is one or the other. There is no middle ground.
Is it a damned lie?
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