Sunday, September 21, 2014

Obama campaign’s open door to China
...Obama’s campaign refuses to use industry-standard safeguards against online credit-card fraud. For example, some 90 percent of e-commerce companies (and Romney’s site) use Card Verification Value data, which checks those three or four numbers on the back of the credit card to make sure the card user matches the card holder. The Obama site uses it if you want to buy a T-shirt or hat — but not if you make a donation....

...Why suspect so much Chinese giving? Consider the site Obama.com. It’s owned by Shanghai-based Obama campaign bundler Robert Roche. More than two-thirds of its traffic comes from non-US visitors, nearly 90 percent of them Chinese. And visitors there immediately get directed to barackobama.com, where they become part of the fund-raising mill.

Roche, one of Obama’s top advisers on trade with China, runs a Shanghai-based media company called Acorn, Inc. Chinese banks use Acorn for — what else? — credit-card transactions. One has to be very naive to believe those banks chose Acorn on their own, instead of at the behest of the Chinese government — or that none of those transactions involve contributions to the Obama campaign.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time China has seen fit to intrude itself in our electoral process. Who can forget Charlie Trie, the Little Rock restaurateur who channeled money from China’s intelligence service to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, or then-Vice President Al Gore gathering all that Chinese cash at a California Buddhist temple?...