FOLLOW-UP Obama overturns ban preventing criminal Ecuadorean Democratic donor from entering U.S.
Hotair ^ | 12/17/2014 | Noah Rothman / FR Posted by SeekAndFind
EXCERPT According to a damning NYT report, the White House overturned a ban on allowing a wealthy Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats.
"Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids,” The Times reported. “But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Ms. Isaías could work for an Obama fund-raiser with close ties to the administration.” That was not the only action the Obama administration has taken on the deeply suspect Isaías family’s behalf.
The family, which has been investigated by federal law enforcement agencies on suspicion of money laundering and immigration fraud, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to American political campaigns in recent years. During that time, it has repeatedly received favorable treatment from the highest levels of the American government, including from New Jersey’s senior senator Menendez and the State Department.
The Obama administration has allowed the family’s patriarchs, Roberto and William Isaías, to remain in the United States, refusing to extradite them to Ecuador. The two brothers were sentenced in absentia in 2012 to eight years in prison, accused of running their bank into the ground and then presenting false balance sheets to profit from bailout funds. In a highly politicized case, Ecuador says the fraud cost the country $400 million.
The most damning accusation implicates the Obama’s, Clinton and her closest confidants at State, Cheryl Mills, and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) in what became, according to The Times, a quid pro quo relationship; campaign donations for waiving a ban on U.S. entry.
Over the course of the next year, as various members of the Isaías family donated to Mr. Menendez’s re-election campaign, the senator and his staff repeatedly made calls, sent emails and wrote letters about Ms. Isaías’s case to Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Mills, the consulate in Ecuador, and the departments of State and Homeland Security.
After months of resistance from State Department offices in Ecuador and Washington, the senator lobbied Ms. Mills himself, and the ban against Ms. Isaías was eventually overturned. Mr. Menendez’s office acknowledged going to bat for Ms. Isaías, but insisted that the advocacy was not motivated by money.
In 2012, the Isaías family donated about $100,000 to the Obama campaign’s Victory Fund. María Mercedes, Estefanía Isaías’s mother, donated $30,000 alone to Sen. Menendez’s 2012 campaign for reelection to the U.S. Senate. Menendez later authored another letter to State requesting that the ban on Isaías’s sister’s entry into the United States be lifted as well, despite the fact that she had been accused of smuggling illegal immigrants into America to serve as maids.
“As that letter went out, their mother gave $20,000 more to the Obama Victory Fund,” The Times reported.
That is an absolute bombshell, and one which implicates both the White House, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Clinton’s State Department in corruption. The entire accounting of apparently disreputable practices from Democrats in the highest positions of authority in America, is positively explosive. It is worth a read; only a portion of this thorough report is reproduced here. --SNIP--
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