Newsmax drops another long report on Obama’s shifty online donations

hotair.com ^ | November 19, 2008 | Allahpundit

[Free ThinkerNY]

The good news? Ken Timmerman’s still on the case. The bad news? This one’s mostly a rehash of his earlier report. If you read that at the time and have been following the story since then at HA — especially the details about Team Barry accepting donations via gift card, which figures prominently in Timmerman’s new piece — you’re pretty much caught up. The juiciest bit of new info:

With more than half of the Obama campaign’s contributions coming from small donors who don’t need to be identified fully, it’s entirely likely that the Edwan brothers were not alone among foreign nationals backing the campaign.

When Newsmax pored over the campaign finance records, more than 65,000 Obama donations appeared to be conversions of foreign currency. According to our analysis of the Obama campaign data, foreign currency donations could range anywhere from $12.8 million to a stunning $63 million.

I can’t tell where he’s getting those numbers or what the criteria are that would allow for such a broad range; the FEC flagged just $5.25 million in overseas donations as potentially questionable according to the piece, but then the FEC only knows about donors who contributed more than $200. One tidbit floated by Timmerman that I hadn’t heard before was that roughly 10 percent of reported Obama donors contributed in uneven amounts instead of round numbers (e.g. $17.02 instead of $20), which turns out to be extremely unusual. Could be an artifact of foreign currency conversions … or, as he acknowledges, it could simply be the result of donors purchasing Obama gear through the online store and having the totals come out unevenly, a problem pre-’Net campaigns wouldn’t have dealt with.

[Vince Ferrer]

See, I have already helped the trade deficit! - Obama

[HokieMom]

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