Obama to Escape Damaging Campaign Finance Audit

The Politico reports a genuinely disturbing story on campaign finance in the aftermath of Barack Obama's deceitful underground fundraising operations that propelled him to the White House.

President-Elect Obama's fundraising practices will not be audited because he chose to go without public financing (a system's designed to take corruption out of politics), while John McCain's campaign is looking to a long period of government auditing (go figure?):

Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

Especially galling is the fact that existing suspicions of massive financial improprieties are focused on the Obama campaign, not McCain's:

Allegations that the Obama campaign was willfully allowing foreign donations and excessive donations blossomed in the conservative blogosphere and prompted the Republican National Committee to file an FEC complaint.

Seizing on Obama’s reversal on a pledge to accept public financing if his Republican opponent agreed to do the same, as well as his campaign’s refusal to voluntarily release the names, addresses and employers of donors who gave less than $200 each – a group that accounted for about half of the more than $600 million that the campaign had raised through the end of September – the RNC asked the FEC “to immediately conduct a full audit” of all of Obama’s contributions.

It’s very rare for a complaint to trigger an audit, campaign finance insiders say.

I wrote about this in a Pajamas Media essay, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud," where I concluded, "the Democratic nominee may now be running the biggest underground finance operation since President Nixon deployed the “plumbers” as his key operatives for CREEP in 1972."

No wonder some Democrats are worried about an Obama impeachment!