The Washington Examiner reports that former Sen. Fred Thompson, who chaired a Senate investigation into illegal contributions by Asian-Americans to Bill Clinton's re-election campaign and to Bill and Hillary Clinton's legal defense fund in the 1996 election cycle, is saying Hillary should have learned from 1996 and been more wary of Norman Hsu's donations and bundled contributions.
Clinton is returning donations to 260 people who were recruited by Hsu. The FBI is investigating whether these were merely "straw" donors who were funneling money from Hsu to Clinton to skirt campaign finance laws.
In March 1996, Bill and Hillary Clinton's legal defense fund accepted money from straw donors recruited by Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie. The Taiwan-born Democrat hand-delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of checks and money orders in two manila envelopes to the defense fund.
The Burning Question: If the FBI is investigating whether those 260 donors may have been "straw" donors funelling money from Hsu to Clinton to evade campaign finance laws, then why is Hillary Clinton giving the money back to them?
If someone who gave the money to your campaign later was found to have gotten the money by robbing a bank, you wouldn't return the money to the donor - you'd return it to the bank.
Given that Hsu had no discernible source of income, at least that press outlets such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times have been able to determine, it is a distinct possibility that even Hsu was merely just a conduit for a river of illegal donations to Hillary's campaign. Neither Hsu nor any of his 260 donors should get a dime of the money back until the ultimate original source of the money is identified, and its legality assured.
Until then, the money should be put into an escrow fund. It could be that Hsu earned the money illegally - he has a track record of doing that, as we're all now aware. If that's the case, then the money should, eventualy, go back to Hsu's victims, not to the willing mules who carried it from his hands to Hillary's campaign.
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