There's An Obama Foundation, Same As The Clintons'

by JASmius





Red Barry evidently takes good, quality notes, and really is willing to learn corruption from the masters:

More than a dozen of the thirty-nine named donors to the Obama Foundation have visited the White House for exclusive gatherings and events, according to a new report from the transparency group MapLight. …

In fact, every donor whose family or foundation had given more than $100,000 met with Obama at the White House, according to the review by MapLight, a non-profit research organization that tracks money in politics. The group looked at White House visitor records, the foundation’s website and its tax returns.

Donors who have met with Obama include the actress Julia Roberts and her cinematographer husband Danny Moder, private equity executive Mark Gallogly and his wife Lise Strickler; and the founder of clothing retailer Zumiez, Tom Campion, and his wife, Sonia.

They all attended a private gathering at the White House in January, MapLight found. The visit went unnoticed because it was not listed on Obama’s public schedule.

Gallogly and Strickler had donated $340,000 to the Barack Obama Foundation before the event, while the Campions had contributed $500,000. [emphases added]

Pay to play with the president of the United States and everything gets covered up.  Neat.

And there is, of course, much, much more....:

Campion and his wife have donated about $270,000 to the DNC since 2007, but they do not appear to have been to a small gathering with Obama in the White House before the one with Julia Roberts in January 2015. One day before that event, the Campion family met with John Podesta, who served as a senior advisor to Obama before joining Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Jim Simons, founder of the private equity firm Renaissance Technologies, and his wife gave $340,000 to the Obama Foundation in 2014. Visitor logs show the Simons family was invited to a smaller event with Obama at the White House for the first time in March 2015 — a dinner with Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, Google parent company chairman Eric Schmidt, and a handful of prominent scientists and mathematicians.

Marilyn Simons had not been invited to the White House before March 2015, visitor logs show. She leads the Simons Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose website says its mission is to “advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences.” In April 2015, Simons met with Meredith Drosback, the assistant director for education and physical sciences in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Simons family contributed an additional $330,000 to the Obama Foundation last year.

....and it's been going on for years:

Barack Obama is using privileged access to the White House to reward his most generous financial supporters in ways that Republican rivals Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum can’t match: More than sixty of Obama’s biggest campaign donors have visited more than once for meetings with top advisers, holiday parties or state dinners, a review by the Associated Press has found.

The invitations to visit the White House, which are a legal and established practice, came despite Obama’s past criticisms of Washington’s pay-for-access privileges and mark a reversal from early in the president’s term, when donors complained that Obama was keeping them at arm’s length.

When Obama was a presidential candidate running against Hillary Rodham Clinton, his campaign sharply noted that [Mrs.] Clinton and her husband, President Bill Clinton, had invited David Geffen — whom Obama’s campaign said had raised $18 million for the Clintons — to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.

The AP found no evidence of Obama’s donors sleeping overnight in the White House, but time stamps showing arrivals and departures on the government’s logs are incomplete for more than 1.7 million records. [emphasis added]

So Barack Obama started up a foundation and sold access to himself and the power and resources of his office in exchange for donations to it, and then conveniently had all record of all those meetings with donors deleted from White House visitor logs, making them enormously more difficult to track to put all the pieces back together, or connect the dots if you prefer that metaphor.

Yes, The One is a Marxist ideologue, but he, too, has his dacha on the Black Sea.

As the old saying goes, "The more Democrats change, the more they stay the same".

[h/t: Captain Ed]