Lawyers, guns and (Obama's) money

I think the word you were looking for is… awkward.

Obama campaign returns $200,000 donation from fugitive’s family

Brothers of Pepe Cardona, who fled drug and fraud charges in the US in 1994, began raising money for Obama last year

Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is returning more than $200,000 in donations from the family of a fugitive casino magnate linked to violence and corruption in Mexico who has been seeking a pardon.

Brothers Carlos and Alberto Rojas Cardona, who live and work in Chicago, began raising money for the Obama campaign and the Democratic national committee last year, the New York Times reported, adding that neither had a history of making political donations.

Their brother Juan José Rojas Cardona, also known as Pepe Cardona, jumped bail in Iowa in 1994 and disappeared, fleeing drug and fraud charges in the US, the paper said.

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Cardona appears to be tied up not only in drug smuggling allegations, but bribing public officials in Mexico and the untimely inhuming of one of his “colleagues” in the trade. His brothers not only raised money for Obama, but were trying to grease the skids with the former chairman of the Iowa Democratic party with an eye toward landing a pardon. (The article goes on to note that they did not succeed in securing the desired papers.)

Jim Geraghty connects the dots and ties Cardona to the drug cartels in Mexico and all of the violence associated with them, bringing us full circle back to Fast and Furious.

At least these guys are courteous enough to tip the administration that supplies their friends with guns so well…

For the record, there are plenty of times where opponents of politicians in both parties can play some gotcha games when it comes to political donations. By the time you make it up to the presidential level, you’ve got tens or hundreds of thousands of checks to go through, and if there’s one from some shady character that slips through the nets, your opponents are playing a bit of dirty pool in making hay out of it. But that’s not the case with these brothers. We’re talking about major league bundlers here who rose up to the top of the ranks of Obama’s donors. If the President’s campaign staff didn’t know about any of this, they are incompetent at best. And if they did know and just hoped nobody would notice, this crosses over into criminal stupidity territory… or worse.

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