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Tuesday, September 23, 2008 6:11 PM |
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How exactly did Barack Obama pay for his
Harvard
Law
School
education?
The way the Obama campaign has answered the question was simply hard work
and student loans.
But new questions have been raised about Obama’s student loans and Obama’s
ties to a radical Muslim activist who reportedly was raising money for Obama’s
Harvard studies during the years 1988 to 1991.
The allegations first surfaced in late March, when former Manhattan Borough
president Percy Sutton told a
New York
cable channel that a former business partner who was “raising money” for Obama had approached him in 1988 to help Obama get into
Harvard
Law
School
.
In the interview, Sutton says he first heard of Obama about twenty years ago
from Khalid Al-Mansour, a Black Muslim and Black Nationalist who was a “mentor”
to the founders of the Black Panther party at the time the party was founded in
the early 1960s.
Sutton described al-Mansour as advisor to “one of the world’s richest men,”
Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Prince Alwaleed catapulted to fame in the
United States
after the September 11 attacks, when
New York
mayor Rudy Guiliani refused his $10 million check to help rebuild
Manhattan
, because the Saudi prince hinted publicly that
America
’s pro-Israel policies were to blame for the attacks.
Sutton knew Al-Mansour well, since the two men had been business partners
and served on several corporate boards together.
As Sutton remembered, Al-Mansour was raising money for Obama’s education and
seeking recommendations for him to attend
Harvard
Law
School
.
“I was introduced to (Obama) by a friend who was raising money for him,”
Sutton told NY1 city hall reporter Dominic Carter. “The friend’s name is Dr.
Khalid al-Mansour, from
Texas
.”
Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told Newsmax that Sutton’s account was “bogus”
and a “fabrication that has been retracted” by a spokesman for the Sutton
family.
He referred Newsmax to a pro-Obama blog published on Politico.com by
reporter Ben Smith.
In a September 3 blog entry, Smith wrote that “a spokesman for Sutton’s family,
Kevin Wardally” said that Sutton had been mistaken when he made those comments
about Obama and Khalid Al-Mansour.
Smith suggested the retraction “put the [Obama/Al-Mansour] story to rest for
good.”
Wardally told Smith that the “information Mr. Percy Sutton imported [sic] on
March 25 in a NY1 News interview regarding his connection to Barack Obama is
inaccurate. As best as our family and the Chairman’s closest friends can tell,
Mr. Sutton, now 86 years of age, misspoke in describing certain details and
events in that television interview.”
Asked which parts of Percy Sutton’s statements were a “fabrication,” LaBolt
said “all of it. Al Mansour doesn’t know Obama. And Sutton’s spokesman
retracted the story. The letter [to Harvard, which Percy Sutton says he wrote
on behalf of Obama], the ‘payments for loans’ — all of it, not true,” he added.
Newsmax contacted the Sutton family and they categorically denied Wardally’s
claims to Smith and the Politico.com. So there was no retraction of Sutton’s
original interview, during which he revealed that Khalid Al-Mansour was
“raising money” for Obama and had asked Sutton to write a letter of
recommendation for Obama to help him get accepted at
Harvard
Law
School
.
Sutton’s personal assistant told Newsmax that neither Mr. Sutton or his
family had ever heard of Kevin Wardally.
”Who is this person?” asked Sutton’s assistant, Karen Malone.
When told that he portrayed himself as a “spokesman” for the family, Malone
told Newsmax, “Well, he’s not.”
According to a 2006
New York
magazine profile, Wardally is part of a “New New Guard” in
Harlem
politics that has been challenging the “lions” of the old guard, Charles Rangel and Percy Sutton. That makes him an unlikely candidate to speak on behalf of Sutton.
Sutton maintains an office at the
Manhattan
headquarters of the firm he founded, Inner City Broadcasting Corporation. ICBC owns
New York
radio stations WBLS and WLIB.
Sutton’s son Pierre (“Pepe”) runs ICBC along with his daughter, Keisha
Sutton-James. Malone told Newsmax that she had consulted with Sutton’s family
members at the station and confirmed that no one knew Kevin Wardally or had
authorized him to speak on behalf of the family.
For someone claiming to be a “spokesman” for the Sutton family, who was
authorized to call Percy Sutton a liar, Wardally even got Percy Sutton’s age
wrong.
Sutton is not 86, as Wardally said, but close to 88. He was born on Nov. 24,
1920.
Wardally responded to a several Newsmax phone messages and emails with a
terse one-line comment, maintaining his statement that Percy Sutton “misspoke”
in the television interview.
“I believe the statement speaks for itself and the Sutton Family and I have
nothing further to say on the topic,” he wrote in an email.
Asked to explain why it was that no one at Inner City Broadcasting Corp.
knew of him or accepted him as a family spokesman, Wardally responded later
that he had been retained by a nephew of the elder Sutton, who “is in our
office almost every week.”
Wardally works for Bill Lynch Associations, a
Harlem
political consulting firm. The nephew, Chuck Sutton, no longer works with the elder Sutton at Inner City Broadcasting, but for a high-tech start-up called Synematics.
“Percy Sutton doesn’t go out idly on television saying things he doesn’t
mean,” a well-connected black entrepreneur who knows Sutton told Newsmax.
Ben LaBolt’s claim that “Al Mansour doesn’t know Obama” was contradicted by
Al Mansour himself in an extended interview with Newsmax.
Comparing the revelation of his ties to Obama to the controversy surrounding
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Al Mansour said that he was determined to keep a low
profile to avoid embarrassing Obama.
“In respect to Mr. Obama, I have told him, because so many people are
running after him… I was determined that I was never going to be in that
situation,” he told Newsmax.
Al Mansour said he was deliberately avoiding any contact with the candidate.
“I’m not involved in any way in celebrity sweepstakes,” he said. “I wish him
well, anything I can do if he lets me know, I’ll let him know what I think I
can do or can’t. But I don’t collect autographs. I wish him the best, and hope
he can win the election.”
He repeatedly declined to comment on the Percy Sutton allegations, either to
confirm or to deny them.
“Any statement that I make would only further the activity which is not in
the interest of Barack, not in the interest of Percy, not in the interest of
anyone,” Al Mansour said.
Unanswered Questions
Sen. Obama has refused to instruct
Harvard
Law
School
to release any information about his time there as a student, or about his student loans.
Newsmax contacted the Dean of Students, the Director of Student Financial
Services, the Registrar, and the Bursar of Harvard Law School. None would
provide any specific information on Barack Obama’s time at Harvard, except for
his dates of attendance (1988-1991) or his year of graduation, 1991.
A spokesman for the law school, Michael Armini, said it was Harvard policy
not to divulge information on alumni without their approval.
“There are lots of reporters nosing around the library,” he acknowledged. So
far, none had turned up any new information.
Law professors Lawrence Tribe and Charles Ogletree have both said publicly
that they were “impressed” by Obama when he was a student.
Sources close to the Sutton family told Newsmax that Percy Sutton wrote a
letter of recommendation for Obama to Ogletree at Khalid Al-Mansour’s request,
but Ogletree declined to answer Newsmax questions about this.
Harvard
Law
School
spokesman Michael Armini said that Harvard was “very generous” with financial aid, but only on the basis on need.
The Obama campaign told Newsmax that Obama self-financed his three years at
Harvard
Law
School
with loans, and did not receive any scholarship from Harvard Law school.
LaBolt denied that Obama received any financial assistance from Harvard or
from outside parties. “No - he paid his way through by taking out loans,” he
said in an email to Newsmax.
At the time, Harvard cost around $25,000 a year, or $75,000 for the three
years that Obama attended. And as president of the Harvard Law Review, he
received no stipend from the school, Harvard spokesman Mike Armini said.
“That is considered a volunteer position,” Armini said. “There is no salary
or grant associated with it.”
So if the figures cited by the Obama campaign for the Senator’s student
loans are accurate, that means that Obama came up with more than $32,000 over
three years from sources other than loans to pay for tuition, room and board.
Where did he find the money? Did it come from friends of Khalid Al Mansour?
And why would a radical Muslim activist with ties to the Saudi royal family be
raising money for Barack Obama?
That’s the question the Obama campaign still won’t answer.
Michelle Obama Speaks Out
Speaking at a campaign event in
Haverford
,
Pa
, in April of this year, Michelle Obama claimed that her husband had “just paid off his loan debt” for his
Harvard
Law
School
education.
In an appearance in
Zanesville
,
Ohio
, in February she bemoaned the fact that many American families were strapped with student loan payments for years after graduation.
“The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two
best-selling books,” she said. The first of those best-sellers netted the
couple $1.2 million in royalties in 2005.
In response to Newsmax questions about the Obama’s college loans, a campaign
spokesman cited a report in The Chicago Sun claiming that Obama borrowed
$42,753 to pay for Harvard Law School, and “tens of thousands” more to pay for
undergraduate studies at Columbia.
The same report said that Michelle Obama borrowed $40,762 to pay for her
years at
Harvard
Law
School
.
But a Newsmax review of Senator Obama’s financial disclosures found no trace
of any outstanding college loans, going back to 2000.
As a United States Senate candidate, Barack Obama was required to file a
financial disclosure form in 2004 detailing his assets, income, consulting
contracts, and liabilities.
Obama listed “zero” under liabilities in 2004 and in all subsequent U.S.
Senate financial disclosure forms.
Under the Senate ethics rules, he is required to disclose any loan,
including credit card debt, of $10,000 or more. The only exception to the
reporting requirement is mortgage debt on a principal residence.
The Senate reports also directly contradict Michelle Obama’s claim that the
couple had “only just” paid off their student loans after receiving book
royalties paid out in 2005 and 2006 – well after her husband had been ensconced
in the Senate.
Apparently, Michelle Obama misspoke, according to the version provided by
the Obama campaign.
Campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt now tells Newsmax that the loans Sen. Obama
took out to pay for Harvard Law School “were repaid in full while he was a
candidate for the U.S. Senate [in 2004], and under the rules, the modest
outstanding balance he repaid was not reportable as a liability on his personal
financial disclosure reports.”
The Senator repaid the loans on “the expectation of a significant increase
in family income” as a result of the paperback edition of his 1995 book, Dreams
of My Father, LaBolt said.
Obama acknowledges that sales of the hard cover edition of the book were
“underwhelming.” But in the spring of 2004,when Obama won the Democrat U.S.
Senate primary in
Illinois
, Rachel Klayman, an editor at Crown Publishers in
New York
, read an article about Obama and became interested in his memoir, only to discover that Crown now owned the rights.
She asked Obama to write a new forward, and Crown then decided to re-issue
Dreams as a paperback in July 2004, just as Obama made his historic speech to
the Democrat National Convention.
The paperback eventually sold over one million copies, which under the
standard industry royalty for trade paperbacks of 7.5%, earned him $1.2
million. However, Obama didn’t report income from the book until 2005, so it’s
unclear how he was able to repay his student loans in 2004.
Responding to attacks from the Hillary Clinton campaign during the
primaries, Obama released seven years of tax returns on March 25 of this year.
The returns, dating back to 2000, indicate that the couple paid no interest
on their student loans. The interest from such loans would have been deductible
on their joint income tax returns.
For 2000 through 2004, taxpayers declared student loan interest as a
deduction on line 24 of federal form 1040. After 2004, the deduction can be
taken on Line 33.
But the Obamas never declared a dime of interest in student loans on their
return, most likely because they simply earned too much money to be able to
take the deduction under the IRS rules.
Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt had no answer as to why the Obamas’ failed to
declare the loans, stating the obvious that “because interest on the loans was
not deducted, it would not appear on the Obamas’ personal return.”
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
The
political action committee of one the country’s leading abortion
advocacy groups has “proudly” endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for
president.
The National Organization for Women -- NOW -- says it is “very unusual” for the group to endorse anyone in a presidential election, but that Barack Obama is “an unprecedented candidate” in “an unprecedented time for our country.” Citing his liberal record on issues such as abortion, pay equity, violence against women, and Supreme Court judges, NOW president Kim Gandy said Obama is “out there every day standing up -- clearly and consistently -- for women.”
Allison Kasic of the Independent Women’s Forum says
NOW’s endorsement of the Barack Obama-Joe Biden ticket is not
surprising given the feminist establishment has been on the side of
bigger government and liberal policies for years. She contends the
feminist establishment is pushing the false notion that women’s rights
merely constitute issues such as reproductive rights, pay equity, and
violence against women.
“That’s too often what we hear from feminist organizations. That’s too
often what we hear from the media, when in reality I think that women
are really across the political spectrum, just as men are," notes
Kasic. "We shouldn’t look at women as a voting bloc because women are
split between political parties just as men are -- and women care about
a wide variety of issues, not just the sort of laundry list of what the
feminist establishment deems to be appropriate for women.”
Kasic believes there is a major disconnect between the feminist establishment and the average American woman.
I first would like to say that I am a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that is a priority in my life. I put that before any other part of my life. There are certain responsibilities that come with that. I am not a political person and I am not looking to endorse a political candidate. As a Christian I do have certain obligations and requirements and they come from the authority of the scriptures. As a Christian I believe that Jesus Christ died so that I can have eternal life and therefore my obligation is to Him and His church.
The reason I feel inclined to mention that is because recently I have come under attack because of my writings concerning people’s doctrines and Philosophies. I had people ask me how I could say that a person is not a Christian just because they do not follow Jesus. I also have people question my political motivations for questioning Barack Obama’s faith. I assure you I am not running for public office and I am not on John McCain’s payroll.
The sad thing is that as an African American man I am expected to blindly support Senator Barack Obama in his bid for the Whitehouse; unfortunately I do not operate like that. As I have previously stated my main agenda is speaking out for things that I feel are priorities to God. Those 2 issues are pro-life issues and the protection of the institution of marriage. I will not vote for a candidate that does not share my same views on these 2 issues. That is a personal thing with me; you have the right under our constitution to not only differ with my opinion but to vote for whoever you like.
I do understand why so many people of color have such a passion for Senator Obama. I just want to shed a little light to white America on what is going on in the hearts and minds of the African American community.
The first thing is identification; because black people in America were stripped of their identity and much of their heritage we have been seeking to regain that for hundreds of years. We therefore, sometimes hold fast on anything that can help us to regain our culture and identity as a race. Our music, our style, and all the things that make us as a people unique to the rest of the world are things that we cherish.
The second thing is reparation; because many African Americans feel as though we have never truly dealt with the horrible institution of slavery that was legal for hundreds of years; we as a people sometime look for anything that we can deem as a payback, or as a form of closure for the pain and hurt that stripped us of our manhood and our humanness not only during the time of legalized slavery but even during the time of the “Jim Crow” era that denied us of our basic human rights. The most ironic part of this is that we as blacks now allow our unborn children to be murdered through abortion based on the same faulty logic that counted the black man as not fully human. But that is an entire story altogether. The thing that makes it worse is that the US government has given reparations to other groups that have been wronged such as the Japanese people during WWII. Blacks up to this point have not received anything of the sort.
As much as I like Senator Obama and would love to support him, I can’t. He is very articulate and intelligent. He has a lot of qualifications that make him a good leader. In good conscious I cannot vote for a person that is that far to the left on Abortion and gay marriage. Because I realize that my relationship to God and what His expectations for me are I have to stand with my faith. The issues of basic human rights and marriage are the very foundation of a civilized society and if we do not get these correct then the economy, healthcare, etc. will be irrelevant.
As a black man I reserve the right to make a choice. I am not telling you who to vote for and I am not saying that I will definitely vote for John McCain. What I am saying is that I put a high priority on my belief in the sanctity of life and the institution of marriage as the very foundation in which civilization rests upon. My vote will reflect what the most important issues of the day are. I will not allow color, gender, or political party to overshadow the issues that must be done in accordance to the will of my creator.
May God bless us all!
An African-American businessman says he cannot, in good conscience, support Senator Barack Obama's bid for the White House.
Joe
Green is president of Hensley Broadcasting and, in 2007, became the
first African-American to own an FCC-licensed radio station in central
Pennsylvania. He wrote an article recently on his website JGMinistries.net titled
"Why do black people love Barack Obama?" In the op-ed piece, Green said
that, as a Christian, his first responsibility is to Jesus Christ and
not to a particular political party or candidate.
Many people, according to Green, are voting for Senator Obama (D-Illinois) for emotional reasons.
"And I mention people like my father and his generation that has [sic]
gone through a lot of persecution and racism because of the color of
their skin. And because of that, this, to many of them -- and I'm not
saying all of them -- but to many of them, this is almost like a thing
that is a fulfillment for them because this is a hope and dream they've
had to be considered equal with everyone else," he contends.
But Green, who is also a minister, says Senator Obama has made it clear
where he stands on issues such as special rights for homosexuals and
abortion. "Not only is [Obama] for abortion rights for any
circumstance, but [while a state lawmaker] he even voted against the
Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which was a law that was going to
protect an unborn child who survived an abortion attempt," he adds.
Green confesses he has come under attack from others in the African-American community for his views.
