I’m sorry I can’t give you a link to this story because it is in a subscription email I receive, but the facts are there as known now.

One of what I think is one of the most under-reported stories in recent memory is the strange saga of Norman Hsu (pronounced “shoe”) of Daly City, Ca, and lately, New York.
Norman Hsu is a leading political fundraiser for Democratic causes, on a scale at least equal to that of disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now doing time in a federal prison.

In political parlance, Norman Hsu is known as a ‘bundler’. He goes out and picks up small campaign contributions from individual donors, and then delivers them up to the intended candidate’s campaign fund — primarily Hillary Clinton’s.

So far this year, Norman Hsu has ‘bundled’ more than $1 million, — quite an accomplishment, given that the maximum individual donation is limited by law to only $4,600 per candidate and very few people ever donate the maximum.

It was recently disclosed that six members of the Paw family in Daly City, California, had donated a combined $45,000 to the Clinton campaign through Hsu since 2005, and a total of $200,000 overall to Democratic candidates since 2005.

Since the head of the Paw household, William Paw, earns about $49,000 a year as a US postal carrier and he recently refinanced is 1,200 square foot house, the donations raised some eyebrows at the FEC.

His wife is a homemaker. His grown children work at ordinary jobs making ordinary incomes. Like Norman Hsu, William and Alice Paw are of Chinese descent.

The entire family got their Social Security cards in California in 1982, according to state records. All but one of the Paws registered to vote as “nonpartisan.” A San Mateo County elections official said that members of the Paw family vote “sporadically.”

But between them, they donated four times’ William Paw’s annual income to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates over the space of three years.

All through Norman Hsu, who rose from mediocrity to one of the DNC’s top bundlers in just three years.

Intrigued FEC investigators were even more intrigued an amazing coincidence unearthed by the Wall Street Journal.

“According to public documents, Hsu once listed his address at the Paw home in Daly City, though it isn’t clear if he ever lived there.

Until three years ago, Hsu never made a campaign contribution to a presidential candidate, according to federal election records. No one in the Paw family had ever given a campaign contribution before the 2004 presidential election, according to campaign-finance reports.

Then, in July 2004, five members of the family contributed a total of $3,600 to the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat. Five of the checks were dated July 27, 2004.

About the same time, Hsu made his first donations to a political candidate, contributing the maximum amount allowed by law to Kerry in two separate checks, on July 21, 2004, and on Aug. 6.

From then on, the correlation of campaign donations between . Hsu and the Paw family has continued. The first donations to Mrs. Clinton came Dec. 23, 2004, when Hsu and one Paw family member donated the then-maximum $4,000 to her Senate campaign in two $2,000 checks, campaign-finance records show.
In March 2005, the individuals gave a total of $17,500 to Mrs. Clinton.

Since then, Hsu, his New York associates and the Paw family have continued to donate to Democratic candidates. This year, Alice Paw and four of the Paw children have donated the maximum $4,600 to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

In summary, we have an immigrant Chinese family of apolitical background and ordinary means donating several times their annual income through immigrant Chinese fundraiser Norman Hsu, primarily to Hillary Clinton’s political action committees and campaign funds.

Does anybody else smell Kung Pao chicken here? And if that isn’t enough to make headlines, there’s more!

Norman Hsu, New York high-profile fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, is also Norman Hsu, convicted felon and fugitive from a three-year California prison sentence.

Assessment:
When the story broke on August 28, the Clinton campaign told the New York Times it saw no reason to return the suspicious donations. Even after it was discovered that Hsu was a fugitive from justice.

Hilliary’s campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson, issued the following statement:

“Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic party and its candidates, including Senator Clinton.

During Mr. Hsu’s many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question or return them.”

It wasn’t until the next day that the Clinton campaign joined a flood of other Democratic recipients to divest themselves of the tainted contributions that Clinton reluctantly announced the campaign would donate some of the money ($23,000) to charity.

Noted the Boston Globe, “The decision came Wednesday as other Democrats began distancing themselves from Norman Hsu, whose legal encounters and links to other Democratic donors have drawn public scrutiny in the past two days.

Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, both of Massachusetts, also planned to turn over Hsu’s contributions to charity. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein of California; Al Franken, a Senate candidate in Minnesota; Reps. Michael Honda and Doris Matsui of California; and Rep. Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania also said they would divest Hsu’s contributions.”

Before moving on, first, notice the list of frantic new charitable donors; John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Al Franken, and last, but not least Hillary Clinton.

Now let’s go back the other way, through Norman Hsu and William Paw and a whole lot of money that seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Go back to 1995 and we find Hillary Clinton up to her neck in “Chinagate” and names like Johnny Chung, James Riady, the People’s Liberation Army, and John Huang.

Huang ended up with a job at the Clinton Commerce Department, on Hillary’s recommendation, where he was embroiled in a ‘controversy’ over Patriot missile sales, F-15 and F-16 fighter jet sales, and bribes paid to the Indonesian dictator Suharto.

Huang later pled guilty to passing Chinese money into the coffers of the DNC for the Clintons. In fact, Huang cited his Fifth Amendment rights over 2,000 times when asked if he was an agent of the Chinese military.

This isn’t intended as a Clinton hit piece. It’s partly about China and Chinese efforts to influence US politics by purchasing US politicians.

Clinton just happens to be the longest-serving member at the top of the list. I didn’t put her there. She did.

I asked you to peruse the rest of the list of top Hsu beneficiaries. Consider what they all have in common, the political, personal and moral values that they share, and their common reputations.

But it isn’t about them, really, either. It’s about the perilous times they represent.

Where are the screaming headlines? Half of America’s top political leadership is evidently on the payroll of the People’s Democratic Republic of China, and the big political story of the week is Larry Craig?

At the time of this writing, a Google news search on the keywords, “Norman Hsu” returned a total of 603 hits. A Google news search on the keywords “Larry Craig arrest” yielded 3,364 separate hits.

Larry Craig may or may not be gay, and may or may not have been ‘cruising’ an airport bathroom for casual sex.

Norman Hsu may or may not be a foreign agent involved in manipulating a US presidential election on behalf of the Chinese government.

Near as I can tell, Larry Craig pleaded no contest to a charge that he touched another man’s foot in a bathroom stall and waved his hand under the divider. That is apparently a ’signal’ for gay sex.

(I have to tell you, if the same thing happened to me, I’d either move my foot or hand the guy a roll of toilet paper. I never got the memo on what constitutes gay hand signals)

But when one compares the Larry Craig scandal to a presidential fund-raising scandal that could conceivably reach from the Clintons to Beijing, they are separated in importance by several orders of magnitude.

Still, the airwaves have been jammed with news about whether or not Craig is gay and if that would require his stepping down from Congress.

The liberal editorials began demanding his ouster, the conservative editorials started musing the hypocrisy demonstrated by the Party of Gay Rights when it comes to gay Republicans, and both sides devoted hours of coverage to his eventual resignation.

The mainstream media’s concentrated focus on the question of whether or not Larry Craig is gay managed to shift public attention away from Hillary Clinton, the top-tier of the Democratic Left, $200,000 in Chinese-tainted money, and Norman Hsu’s surrender as a California fugitive.

Let’s revisit the Hsu list once more, shall we? Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Al Franken. . . the complete list is here.