Credit card fraud: Hillary edition

Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns pioneered the acceptance of illegal foreign donations. I first wrote about it in the 2008 New York Post column “Dubious donations.” In 2012 it was same as it ever was, or so it seemed. By September 2012 Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute had produced a 98-page report documenting the phenomenon. The silence of the mainstream media showed it was same as it ever was in that respect too.

This time around the Clinton campaign appears to have moved on to credit card fraud. That is the gist of Liz Crokin’s New York Observer exclusive “Hillary Clinton campaign systematically overcharging poorest donors.” Crokin reports:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is stealing from her poorest supporters by purposefully and repeatedly overcharging them after they make what’s supposed to be a one-time small donation through her official campaign website, multiple sources tell the Observer.

The overcharges are occurring so often that the fraud department at one of the nation’s biggest banks receives up to 100 phone calls a day from Clinton’s small donors asking for refunds for unauthorized charges to their bankcards made by Clinton’s campaign. One elderly Clinton donor, who has been a victim of this fraud scheme, has filed a complaint with her state’s attorney general and a representative from the office told her that they had forwarded her case to the Federal Election Commission.

This is a story with a local angle several times over. Crokin identifies a Minnesota victim and two banks with deep Minnesota connections — Wells Fargo and US Bank — along with a related complaint to the Minnesota Attorney General. The complaint is going nowhere.

Well, I will concede this much. If true, the reported credit card shenanigans are far from the worst thing about either Obama or Clinton.

NOTE: Crokin’s story comes with the disclosure that Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media.

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