The good news? Ken Timmerman’s still on the case. The bad news? This one’s mostly a rehash of his earlier report. If you read that at the time and have been following the story since then at HA — especially the details about Team Barry accepting donations via gift card, which figures prominently in Timmerman’s new piece — you’re pretty much caught up. The juiciest bit of new info:

With more than half of the Obama campaign’s contributions coming from small donors who don’t need to be identified fully, it’s entirely likely that the Edwan brothers were not alone among foreign nationals backing the campaign.

When Newsmax pored over the campaign finance records, more than 65,000 Obama donations appeared to be conversions of foreign currency. According to our analysis of the Obama campaign data, foreign currency donations could range anywhere from $12.8 million to a stunning $63 million.

I can’t tell where he’s getting those numbers or what the criteria are that would allow for such a broad range; the FEC flagged just $5.25 million in overseas donations as potentially questionable according to the piece, but then the FEC only knows about donors who contributed more than $200. One tidbit floated by Timmerman that I hadn’t heard before was that roughly 10 percent of reported Obama donors contributed in uneven amounts instead of round numbers (e.g. $17.02 instead of $20), which turns out to be extremely unusual. Could be an artifact of foreign currency conversions … or, as he acknowledges, it could simply be the result of donors purchasing Obama gear through the online store and having the totals come out unevenly, a problem pre-‘Net campaigns wouldn’t have dealt with. That’s the problem with trying to prove or debunk this: There’s smoke and fire here, but there’s no way to tell how much since Captain Transparency won’t release the data on his small donors. As Timmerman notes re: the mystery of uneven amounts, they won’t even produce an accounting for the online store.

There’s a way to solve that problem, of course, but good luck making it happen. I’ll leave you with a bit from the section on gift cards since it captures better than anything how shady Team Barry was in lowering its security measures, a step the McCain camp notably refused to take. Of all the ways in which the media tanked for The One, failing to push him on this when his online money dynamo was a central story of the campaign must rank near the top, especially given the piercing shrieks that would have come from the left if the shoe were on the other foot.

Newsmax asked whether Chase Paymentech [Obama’s credit card processor] had any security feature that would allow it to identify individuals making contributions using gift cards, but Wester declined to comment.

But other industry analysts, who asked not to be identified, told Newsmax that processors could track gift cards and debit cards “only by the numbers on the cards.”

“There are no names associated with these cards, so as a processor, you have no way of knowing who made the transaction,” one industry analyst said.

Anyone can go into a supermarket or a drugstore and buy a batch of these cards with cash, so there is no trace of the transaction, he added.

“It’s like walk-around money. They could be handing these things out as perks” to newly registered voters or others, “and there’s no way of tracing who is using them.”

Boehm tells Newsmax that contributions such as these clearly are illegal. “Making a contribution in the name of another person is the only part of federal election law that actually carries a criminal penalty,” says Boehm.