Technorati Tags: Rezko,Obama,Fraud,NAFTA,Goolsbee
Something happened on the way to the coronation: the truth hit Barack Obama square in the face.
Noam Scheiber of The New Republic previously dismissed the NAFTA-Canuk story, now admits the story has legs:
Two things make it problematic for the Obama campaign: 1.) The sudden appearance of this lurid-sounding memo written by a Canadian consular official. I don’t think it’s particularly revealing–as I said this morning, it reflects what the Canadians thought they heard from Goolsbee; there are, significantly, no direct quotes. But the term “memo” just sounds bad–as though there were some cover-up that’s now falling apart. 2.) Certain Obama officials denied last week that there was any contact between the Obama campaign and the Canadian government about NAFTA. That’s clearly no longer “operative,” as Howard Wolfson pointed out on the call. While the memo story is a little ambiguous on its own–the Canadian official claims Goolsbee said one thing; he claims he said another–the Obama campaign’s previous denials will make the press view their current claims more skeptically.
Combined with the slow leak coming from the Rezko story, strong numbers for Hillary in Ohio, and reports of a late break toward Hillary in Texas, and tomorrow could add up to a disaster for the socialist canidate Obama.
John Fund elaborates on the bad news for Obama on the Rezko front in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Yet how he [Obaman] rose so quickly in Chicago’s famously suspect politics – and who his associates were there – has received little scrutiny.
That may change today as the trial of Antoin “Tony” Rezko, Mr. Obama’s friend of two decades and his campaign fund-raiser, gets under way in federal court in Chicago. Mr. Rezko, a master fixer in Illinois politics, is charged with money laundering, attempted extortion, fraud and aiding bribery in an alleged multimillion dollar scheme shaking down companies seeking state contracts.
The WSJ story is good reading. Fund details Rezko’s curious connections to an Iraqi billionaire living London. The Iraqi was convicted by a French court in the largest European scandal since WWII, according to Fund. Pay attention to this name: Nadhmi Auchi, the Iraqi billionaire:
Mr. Obama says he has “no recollection” of meeting Mr. Auchi during a 2004 trip the billionaire made to Chicago, and no one believes he knew of his background.
Barack Obama also had no contact, whatsoever, with the Canadian government regarding NAFTA–until we learned he did.
Bob Novak squeezes the pertinent facts into a single a paragraph that should find its way into every journalism textbook ever to be written:
Obama bought a mock Georgian mansion on Chicago’s south side on June 15, 2005, the same day Rezko’s wife bought a plot next door from the same seller. Obama then purchased from Rezko another parcel at above-market value. Federal prosecutors recently revealed that Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi billionaire who lives in London, wired $3.5 million to the financially strapped Rezko in Chicago less than a month before the Obama-Rezko purchases. James Bone, investigative reporter for the Times of London, wrote last Tuesday that “the money transfer raises the question of whether funds” from Auchi “helped” Obama buy his house.
Obama appears shadier by the minute. No wonder Hillary was proud to share the stage with him.