Chinese Influence Peddling

By Tom Haughey

Last week I read an article in World Magazine that caused me to think back to the first Obama presidential election. Long-time readers of this column will remember that I wrote extensively then about Obama setting up a fundraising website and paying extra to remove its security feature that would have prevented illegal foreign donations to his campaign. A Chinese businessman with close links to the Chinese Communist Party then set up another website to funnel money from Chinese donors to the Obama fundraising site. These donations (and there were a ton of them) were all for just under the legal limit, which would have required detailed reporting to the Federal Election Commission.
By using this ruse, Barack Obama was able to use (potentially) hundreds of millions of Chinese dollars in his presidential campaign.

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