hillbuzz article about obama bribe for $10,000..hill buzz.

The article below is from last year. It’s a story that was never picked up by the media (since when have they ever picked up anything about Obama?) and the Clinton campaign did not know what to do with this — people we’ve spoken to said that, in retrospect, they realize what a mistake this was because what Obama did here is actually a prosecutable crime. We were told, specifically, that the bribe Obama took as a state senator is the thing David Axelrod has lived in terror of this whole campaign — he has been praying this does not get out.

One reason this never came back to bite Obama is that the article below is overly long — and the part about the bribe is buried in the middle — it’s no coincidence this story appeared in the LA Times. The article’s author, Dan Morain, tried to bring this bribe up in the primaries, but never had any support in the media to go anywhere with it.

One of the greatest advantages Obama has is that he’s surrounded by so many crooked deals, kooks, loons, and criminals that it’s hard for the public to understand most of what’s going on. Here in Chicago, Team Hillary kept trying to bring up Obama’s connections to Tony Rezko and the land deal for Obama’s Mansion — but people couldn’t understand what the Rezko dealings were all about. They still don’t understand it. And they won’t read a long article like the one below about the rest of Obama’s dirty dealings.

In short, Obama had massive campaign debt coming off of his failed bid to challenge Bobby Rush for a seat in Congress. Smarting from that loss, Obama needed money, so he turned to Yesse Yehudah. What’s so strange about this is that Yehudah is a Republican — so why would he raise money for Obama? What the article below does not say is that, magically, 10 people who work for Yehudah and have never given money to any elected official before - AND WHO COULD NOT AFFORD TO MAKE $1,000 donations - all made $1,000 donations to Obama simultaneously. As if someone else made the donations for all of them, in their names, with money that came from somewhere else.

The quid pro quo on this is simple: Obama took a $10,000 bribe from Yehudah for using his position in the state senate to throw a $75,000 grant to Yehudah’s nonprofit organization. People here in Chicago say this was obvious politics in Illinois: where Obama agreed to get Yehudah a grant, but Obama’s fee for this transaction was $10,000 to pay off his campaign debt.

Yehudah’s nonproft later came under investigation, and Obama panicked: he dumped $5,000 of the bribe money he took over to Yehudah as fast as he could after that.

Read the story below from Dan Morain. We know this one is tough because it’s not easy for most people to understand Illinois politics — but what Obama did here with this grant is illegal, and it’s the kind of things politicians in Illinois go to jail for all the time — including our last governor George Ryan, and most likely our current governor Rod Blagojevich too.

Bribes like this are what people mean when they refer to “dirty Chicago politics”