Clinton Returning 850,000! linked to Hsu

WASHINGTON -- Confronted with new evidence that it had ignored warnings about fundraiser Norman Hsu, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign abruptly announced late today that it was returning $850,000 from 260 donors associated with Hsu.

The announcement was made five minutes after the Los Angeles Times asked Clinton officials to respond to mid-June campaign e-mails the newspaper obtained that dismissed concerns about Hsu and his business practices.



"I can tell you with 100 certainty that Norman Hsu is NOT involved in a ponzi scheme," wrote Samantha Wolf, who had the title West Coast finance director for the campaign. She has since left the campaign. "He is COMPLETELY legit." She wrote the e-mail in June to a party official who was asking questions about Hsu and his reputation in the financial world.

The campaign also announced it was instituting new procedures to check out major contributors, including running criminal background checks.

Hsu, 56, has contributed or raised more than $1.2 million for Clinton and other Democrats -- one of the party's leading fundraisers. But Hsu became a source of embarrassment after The Times revealed in late August that he was a fugitive wanted on a 15-year-old bench warrant stemming from an early 1990s investment fraud case. He called the matter a misunderstanding, then failed to show at a San Mateo County hearing and was rearrested last week in Colorado after falling ill there on an eastbound train.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-hsu11sep11,1,7623157.story?coll=la-news-politics-national&track=crosspromo

Wow.

get very expensive for all the candidates.....if they follow suit.



http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-hsu11sep11,1,7623157.story?page=1&track=crosspromo&coll=la-news-politics-national




Nearly all major presidential campaigns rely on bundlers, and most do the same minimal background checks that the Clinton campaign had employed.

Generally, campaign officials said, those background checks involve a campaign worker running the name of a major donor or bundler through a public database such as LexisNexis, which provides access to newspaper, magazine and journal articles, as well as congressional transcripts and television broadcasts.

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Anthony Corrado, a campaign expert at Colby College, said that though the refunds announced by Clinton on Monday were "certainly significant," he doubted that the loss of $850,000 would "have a material effect" on the senator's campaign, which has raised more than $55 million so far. He predicted that Bill Clinton's upcoming fundraiser for his wife, aimed at expatriates in London, would replace the loss.