Hillary, Obama donor arrested for fraud

posted at 3:05 pm on August 25, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
Share on Facebook | printer-friendly

Maybe Barack Obama can’t choose administration officials competently, but Hillary Clinton would not have been much better.  For the second time, a major fundraiser for Hillary finds himself under arrest for fraud.  Hassan Nemazee also raised money for Obama’s presidential run ($500,000) and at one time chaired the finance committee for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee when Chuck Schumer ran it:

Hassan Nemazee, chairman of Nemazee Capital Corp. and a fundraiser for President Obama and Hillary Clinton, was arrested on charges that he tricked Citigroup Inc. into lending him as much as $74 million using phony documents.

Nemazee got the loan by telling Citibank that he held accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars which could serve as collateral, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said today in a statement. He used fake addresses and phone numbers to mislead the bank, prosecutors said.

The accounts “either never existed or had been closed years before Nemazee submitted the documents referencing those accounts,” Bharara said in the statement.

Nemazee, 59, repaid the loan to Citibank yesterday, a day after he was interviewed by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, prosecutors said. The interview took place at Newark Liberty International Airport as Nemazee was checking in for a flight to Rome.

By comparison, Norman Hsu was a piker.  Hsu went to prison in May for defrauding investors out of $20 million while he used their money to rub elbows with Hillary Clinton and a host of Democrats in high places.  The scandal embarrassed but did not slow Hillary in the primaries, although it provided plenty of evidence that the Clintons didn’t do much checking when it came to their big-ticket donors.

Nemazee didn’t get away with the money, however, unlike Hsu, who ran through most of it.  The feds caught him before he left the country, which means they have been watching him for a while.  That could lead to some other interesting lines of inquiry, although this kind of fraud usually doesn’t involve a network of conspirators.

The big question is, of course, how many more fraudsters will drop out of the Democratic fundraising firmament.  We thought the last Hsu had dropped in May.

Moe Lane has more.

Update: HA reader Buy Danish tips me via e-mail that I wrote about Nemazee at Captains Quarters five years ago:

Nemazee isn’t the only five- to six-figure donor to the Kerry campaign connected to efforts aimed at lifting the economic sanctions against the Iranian mullahcracy. Faraj Aalaei has raised between $50,000 to $100,000 for the Kerry campaign while his new wife, Susan Akbarpour, has raised a similar amount. Akbarpour came to the US from Iran on a tourist visa but has since launched a newspaper, magazine, and a trade association that also lobbies for normalized relations with the Iranian government.

Akbarpour, it should be noted, sought asylum from the Iranians last year when she emigrated, according to author Kenneth Timmerman, who has written on this subject before.

The article also outlines other positions that Kerry has taken for normalization with the current Iranian regime rather than support the nascent democratization efforts within Iran. It appears that the Kerry campaign’s commitment to fighting terrorism and its sponsors takes a back seat to pandering to its financial supporters — as does American national security.

Blowback

You must be logged in to post a comment.