Election 2008: For an ambitious and savvy politician, Barack Obama has not picked his friends wisely. They include an assortment of influence-peddlers, terrorists and Iraqi billionaires. If you thought the Clinton White House was interesting, just wait.
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The jury has been selected and opening arguments were heard Thursday in the corruption trial of Antonin "Tony" Rezko. If the name doesn't ring a bell, it's because the press hasn't shown much interest in what has been considered a local Chicago story. But it has international and disturbing implications.
Hillary Clinton may have been casting the first stone in a recent debate when she blasted Obama's cozy relationship with Syrian immigrant and "slumlord" Rezko, who rose to become a player in Chicago and Illinois politics. But she was right on target.
Rezko: Fixer for a front-runner?
Rezko was among Obama's earliest supporters. In 1995, when Obama ran for a seat in the Illinois Senate, Rezko, through two of his companies, gave Obama $2,000. Obama won election in 1996 in a district that coincidentally included 11 of Rezko's 30 low-income housing projects.
In 2003, when Obama said he'd run for the U.S. Senate, Rezko held a lavish fundraiser at his Wilmette, Ill., mansion. Rezko has raised a lot of money for Obama, who is returning $150,000 raised by Rezko and his associates and is giving $72,650 in Rezko contributions to charity.
Rezko is known by the Chicago press as a "fixer" who can make things happen for a price. Little is done out of the goodness of his heart. He's on trial for bilking up to $6 million from the people of Illinois through kickbacks while working for the administration of current Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Did Rezko find jobs for Obama supporters? That is one of the questions the Chicago press wanted to ask before Obama cut short a recent press conference.
Rezko and Obama would do business yet again. In 2005, when Rezko was under federal investigation for influence peddling in Blagojevich's administration, Obama and Rezko's wife, Rita, bought adjacent pieces of property from a Chicago doctor.
The doctor sold one parcel to Obama for $1.65 million, $300,000 below the asking price, while Rezko's wife paid full price, $625,000, for the adjacent vacant lot. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko's wife $104,500 for a 10-foot-wide strip of her land, allegedly so that he could have a bigger yard.
The deal rendered the Rezko parcel too small to build on, thereby increasing the value of Obama's property. What was Rezko expecting in return for this favor to Obama that made Rezko's parcel almost worthless?
An interesting sidebar to the deal was that just weeks before, an Iraqi billionaire by the name of Nadhmi Auchi, who has a French conviction for corruption to his credit, had loaned Rezko $3.5 million through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services FA.
A 2004 Pentagon report obtained by the Washington Times identified Auchi as a global arms dealer and Iraqi billionaire "who, behind the facade of legitimate business, served as Saddam Hussein's principle international financial manipulator and bag man."
The report states that "significant and credible evidence has been developed that Nadhmi Auchi has engaged in unlawful activities" such as bribing "foreign governments and individuals prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom to turn opinion against the American-led mission to remove Saddam Hussein." He also helped "arrange for significant theft from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program to smuggle weapons and dual-use technology into Iraq."
Yet Auchi, despite his French conviction and other activities, was somehow able to get permission to come to Chicago in 2004. John Batchelor of Human Events says that in April 2004 Auchi met with Rezko, Gov. Blagojevich, State Senate President Emil Jones Jr. and reportedly then-state Sen. Obama, who'd just won the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination.
So this, er, businessman meets Obama and friends at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Chicago. Obama acknowledges attending an event there where Rezko was present but doesn't recall meeting Auchi. "He shook a lot of hands and met a lot of people," an Obama aide told the London Times.
Did he shake Auchi's? The newspaper said the timing of the loan to Rezko and the Obama property purchase, along with the purchase of land next door by Rezko's wife from the same seller, raise questions about whether Auchi helped buy the house. It raises a lot of questions.
Why would an Iraqi billionaire, a "fixer" like Rezko and a Saddam protege, be interested in a rising U.S. politician who was also opposed to the ousting of Hussein by U.S. forces? Why would that billionaire lend that much money to Obama's fundraiser, Rezko, with the two buying adjacent properties from the same seller on the same day?
Rezko has told a court that Auchi is a "close friend." Obviously. Aside from the $3.5 million loan, Auchi and Rezko became partners in a Midwest pizzeria business. Through various dealings, Rezko wound up owing Auchi more than $27 million. What did Auchi want in return? Perhaps a friend in the White House? Both Rezko and Auchi were, and are, in the business of buying influence.
Among Obama's circle of friends is William C. Ayers, currently a professor of education at the University of Chicago and a former aide to Chicago's current mayor, Richard M. Daley. He served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago.
Back in the 1970s he was known simply as Bill Ayers, a terrorist with the Weathermen who was quoted in the New York Times as finding "a certain eloquence in bombs." Married to fellow Weathermen terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, he writes openly about his role in the 1974 bombing of the U.S. Capitol Building.
His memoirs appeared in the New York Times, oddly enough, on Sept. 11, 2001. In them, he wrote: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Does Barack Obama agree? Or will he denounce these words of his friend as he did with Louis Farrakhan after Farrakhan's endorsement of Obama?
The trial of an Illinois influence-peddler may answer the many questions that surround the past and future of Barack Obama. Clearly, the friends he has chosen are not friends of honest, clean government or of the United States.
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