Donor flees the coop

Democratic donor Norman Hsu has skipped out on two million dollars of bail. As diligent blogger, Flip Pidot, has been poring over state and federal records to total up all the money that Hsu or his associates have donated to candidates, all of whom but one are Democrats. According to Pidot, Hsu gave over three-quarters of a million dollars to Democratic candidates and organizations and his associates gave even more.

I'm still working to incorporate the municipal data, but below are the summary results of a nationwide scour of all state and federal campaign finance disclosure documents published since the 2004 cycle. Already, you'll find 65 Democratic candidates (even one Republican(!), though he lost...) running for everything from State Assembly to President. You'll find them running in 32 states. You'll find 9 Democratic campaign committees and 10 Democratic state parties in the mix.

If you try to take this case on the surface as it's presented, it's totally bizarre. This guy seems to have no visible means of how he's earning all the money he's been throwing around.

On campaign finance reports, he has listed his occupation as an executive at an assortment of companies that appear to be connected to the apparel trade, although efforts to verify his involvement with them have proven fruitless. An address he has given as his office in New York’s garment district seems to be little more than a mail drop, and people who work nearby have said they rarely see him.

Philip Klein uncovers some more suspicious employment information in Hsu's records.

In campaign finance reports, Hsu's companies are listed as: Next Components Ltd., Cool Planets Ltd., Because Men's Clothes, and Dilini Management. But none of the companies have online footprints or appear in fashion industry directories that I have searched. The only official recognition of any of these companies that I have found is Next Components, in the form of a filing for a certificate of corporation with the New York Department of State, Division of Corporations -- but even that doesn't hold up to closer scrutiny. The filing was from May 6, 2005, and when I called the Division of Corporations, a representative there told me that the filing needed to be renewed every two years for a fee of $9, but Next Components never responded to the renewal notice.

The filing lists 561 Seventh Ave., Suite 1301 as the address for Next Components, but I called Handro Properties, the management company that runs the building, and was told that not only have they never heard of Next Components, but "Suite 1301" doesn't even exist.

So how does this guy without any visible means of support have all this money to donate? How does he get $2 million on bail that he skipped out on? Who put up that money for someone who already skipped out on bail before? How did authorities not have a clue that their fugitive from justice was living the high life in New York City? Did they ever take a chance and just put his name into Google and see if he was showing up anywhere?

And how did all these political campaigns miss out that there was an outstanding warrant for the guy shoveling cash into their campaigns? Didn't any of them check him out? As the Los Angeles Times reported, there were standard steps that could have been done that would have uncovered information.

The most obvious red flag: A check of a commonly used database produces a 1990 San Francisco Chronicle news story detailing how Norman Hsu had been kidnapped by gang members in the San Mateo County suburb of Foster City. A second widely used database discloses that Norman Yuan Yuen Hsu of Foster City had a bankruptcy in 1990.

Having established that he lived in San Mateo County, a check of the San Mateo County Superior Court's website reveals that Norman Yuan Yuen Hsu had a criminal case.

In the early 1990s, Hsu, 56, pleaded no contest to grand theft in a scheme that cost investors $1 million, and then disappeared. On Friday, Hsu turned himself in to San Mateo County authorities.

Superior Court Judge H. James Ellis ordered him held on $2 million bail. Hsu, dressed in a sharply tailored black suit, was led from the court in handcuffs. After posting bail, the depth of his woes became more apparent. A Justice Department source disclosed that the FBI has opened an investigation into Hsu's campaign donations.

The question we really should be wondering about is why Hsu suddenly decided to become a big Democratic fundraiser and donor. What did he want. The LA Times quotes Clinton aides saying that he never asked for anything.

Aides to Clinton and others say Hsu never asked for favors. But, like many donors, he would have his photo snapped with prominent people. A vanity wall lined with pictures of senators and governors can impress potential business partners, particularly those not be savvy enough to know that politicians regularly pose for such pictures.

"I recall him as a regular face at Democratic candidate fundraising events," said John Emerson, one of Clinton's major Southern California backers. "He strikes me as one of those guys who likes to be in the room, likes to be the guy who is there and has taken a picture with a candidate.

Come on. We have a guy whose means of earning the money that he donated is mysterious. If he's trying to impress potential business partners with all his photographs, where is the evidence that he's gone into business with those potential partners? Was he getting any bang from his smiling photographs? If all he wanted was impressive photos, why was he so partisan in his donations? In 2004, didn't he want to show that he was influential with other the Republican politicians in power in Washington or Albany or New York City? Or was there some more nefarious reason for all those donations to so many Democratic politicians?

There's a lot here for some inquiring journalists. Are they going to leave all the research to bloggers?

UPDATE: And there does seem to be a small trend here in shady donors to Hillary's campaign.

Sant S. Chatwal, an Indian American businessman, has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaigns, even as he battled governments on two continents to escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens.

The founder of the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, Chatwal is one of a growing number of fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign whose backgrounds have prompted questions about how much screening the candidates devote to their "bundlers" while they press to raise record amounts.

Chatwal's case reached from his native India to New York City. The IRS pursued him for approximately $4 million in unpaid business taxes, while New York state placed a lien seeking more than $5 million in taxes. He forfeited a building to New York City on which he was delinquent on property taxes and was sued by federal regulators seeking to recoup millions of dollars in loans from a failed bank where he served as a director.

Across the ocean, three Indian banks forced him into U.S. bankruptcy, and he was charged with bank fraud. He was out on bond when he showed up in India in 2001 during a visit by his longtime friend Bill Clinton.

Yet none of the legal and financial woes -- occasionally touched on in American or Indian newspapers or highlighted by political opponents -- raised red flags inside Hillary Clinton's fundraising operation. Chatwal recently said he plans to help raise $5 million from Indian Americans for Clinton's presidential bid.

And Clinton is not alone in being the recipient of such questionable funds.

Former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) faced such questions last week when federal prosecutors in Michigan indicted Geoffrey Fieger, the lawyer famous for defending assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, accusing him of channeling $127,000 in illegal contributions into Edwards's 2004 presidential campaign. Edwards's aides said, and prosecutors confirmed, that the activity was concealed from Edwards and that the candidate cooperated once he learned of problems.

Similarly, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) gave to charity more than $30,000 in donations from Illinois fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko and his associates after Rezko was indicted in a federal corruption case. "We do our best to go through the hundreds of thousands of people who give to make sure there aren't problems," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said. "I wouldn't say it's a perfect process, but we are as vigilant as possible."

I recognize that it's difficult to do a full vetting on guys who show up with open wallets. The GOP have had their own dirty money scandals from Jack Abramoff and those in bed with him to Ted Stevens and others in the Alaska GOP. I hope that the Hsu scandal and the questions it raises will get a full airing in the media and not just be brushed aside as bad luck for the Democrats to have attracted money from a questionable character.

Oops - it was 2 million dollars in bail, not 2 billion. Wow. Sorry.

But why was a guy who'd already fled justice once out on bail in the first place and even before he'd turned his passport in?