Remember the strange case of Norman Hsu that roiled the Hillary Clinton campaign during the Democratic primary back in 2007?
Hsu was a top bundler for the campaign who was found to have hidden his past as a crook and Hillary was forced to return over $800,000 in donations. He later plead guilty to a Ponzi scheme and was convicted on campaign finance charges.
Hsu, who currently resides in federal prison, reimbursed so-called “straw donors” drawn from his fraudulent business to get around contribution limits.
At the time of the crisis, Hassan Nemazee, indicted yesterday in his own alleged Ponzi scheme — considerably larger than Hsu’s $20 million operation — was a national finance chair for the Hillary campaign.
And guess who the campaign dispatched to talk to reporters to tamp down the Hsu story? One Hassan Nemazee.
Here he is in the New York Times in September 2007 preemptively accusing the other Dem campaigns of hypocrisy:
In defense, Clinton advisers note that her top Democratic rivals, Senator Barack Obama and John Edwards, have their own fund-raising problems that will prevent them from attacking her over Mr. Hsu.…
“The Clinton campaign has done as much if not more than any campaign to protect itself from situations such as this, and none of the other campaigns, other than hypocritically, can point a finger at the Clinton campaign on fund-raising problems,” said Hassan Nemazee, who is a fund-raising bundler for Mrs. Clinton, as Mr. Hsu had been.
A shocked — simply shocked — Nemazee told the Washington Post of Hsu that same month: “I think a lot of us are scratching our heads.”
Here he is in November describing Hsu’s MO to the Wall Street Journal. And another Post piece quotes Nemazee making an observation about Hsu that may also be true of Nemazee himself: “Never once, that I ever came across, did he seem to have a particular policy or issue agenda. The only thing he ever seemed to want was to get his photo taken.”
(h/t The Nation)