For those who question why the Norman Hsu connection to Hillary Clinton has remained part of the news cycle, the following might help answer some questions. Writing at the Washington Post Peter Baker in one condensed article captures the essence of the Senate Investigation into illegal contributions to both Former President Clinton’s re-election campaign and the Clinton legal defense fund.

The case evokes the fundraising scandals born out of Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996, which dominated Washington for more than a year after the vote as one unseemly tale after another emerged about White House fundraising tactics and the characters trying to buy access through questionable if not illegal methods.

The president used the White House to stroke donors in a more methodical way than any of his predecessors had ever done, inviting hundreds of top contributors and politically connected people to attend coffees with him in the executive mansion or even to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. (”Ready to start overnights right away,” Clinton wrote on a fundraising memo.) Vice President Al Gore made fundraising calls from his office and attended a fundraiser at a Buddhist temple where nuns who had taken vows of poverty were illegally reimbursed for $2,500 contributions.

The Clinton team ended up sending back millions of dollars as the revelations widened. John Huang, a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, raised $3.4 million for the party and its campaign, but nearly half of it had to be returned because of questions about the donors, including some from overseas. Huang was the one who organized the Gore event at the Hsi Lai Temple outside Los Angeles that brought in $140,000, most of which had to be given back.

The DNC also returned $253,000 donated by businesswoman Pauline Kanchanalak after she said the money came from her mother-in-law and $366,000 to Johnny Chung, who told investigators a Chinese military officer had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars to funnel to the Democrats. The Clinton legal defense fund refunded or refused to accept at least $640,000 from Charlie Trie, a businessman who showed up one day with two manila envelopes filled with checks.

Hillary Clinton was caught up in the scandals to some degree. At one point, it emerged that Chung had delivered $50,000 directly to the first lady’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, at the White House. Williams forwarded the check to the DNC, even though federal law bars officials from receiving political donations on government property.

As the story on Mr. Hsu has grown with the assistance of the LATimes more and more questions have surfaced as to what Senator Clinton and/or her staff knew and when exactly they were aware that Hsu was a man with a criminal record and a potential problem as a fundraiser?

Questions about Hsu were first raised in June by an Irvine businessman, Jack Cassidy, who contacted the Clinton campaign and party officials about his suspicions, which he had heard about through a friend.

“There is a significant probability that a man using the name of Norman Hsu is running a Ponzi scheme,” Cassidy wrote to a California Democratic Party official on June 18 in an e-mail obtained by The Times. Describing the deal he understood Hsu was offering to investors, he wrote: “The math does not work!”

The party official passed Cassidy’s concerns to Samantha Wolf, who rejected them.

On June 20, Cassidy sent an e-mail directly to Wolf.

“I am more than ever convinced that a man claiming to be a big fundraiser for Hillary Clinton is running a Ponzi scheme,” he wrote. He said he feared that an associate “may lose her home” because of her participation in the scheme and cautioned Wolf that Hsu may be “using your good name in vane.”

Cassidy said Wolf did not respond to the e-mail warning.

If you were a candidate for president and knew that in the past you were in any way associated with difficulties with campaign financing, would you just brush off a warning that there was a potential for more of the same? One would think being dismissive might not be the ideal tact to take.

Also, as of this writing, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has refused to release the name of the 260 donors whose funds will be returned because they are linked to bundling by Hsu. This makes it most difficult for anyone to track these very same contributions if what they have announced materializes.

Although Clinton will return the money raised by Hsu, Wolfson said the individual contributors could make new donations.

“We will accept their contributions and ask them to confirm for our records that they are from their own personal funds,” he said in an e-mail.

I don’t know if I would contribute again to the Senator’s coffers while the FBI is in the throws of an investigation into this matter. It is a shame in some respects because there may be many individuals who get caught up in a matter which they never anticipated. I say may because though there seem to be signs pointing to more campaign finance shenanigans but until the official report by the investigative team is issued, no direct accusations can be made.

Now there is the matter of the Fred Thompson’s campaign jumping into the fray.

Hillary Clinton’s links to illegal fundraising by Asian-Americans in 1996 should have made her wary of accepting $850,000 from a fugitive Asian-American this year, a rival presidential campaign said Tuesday.

The criticism came from an adviser to former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, who chaired a Senate investigation into illegal contributions by Asian-Americans to Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign and the couple’s legal defense fund in the 1996 election cycle.

Thompson adviser Rich Galen said Clinton’s 2008 campaign has become “the sequel” to her husband’s scandal-plagued 1996 campaign.

Sadly, the spokesman for the Clinton campaign rather than addressing the irregularities attributed to Hsu decided to reply in this manner to Mr. Galen:

Wolfson said, “We reject the suggestion that suspicion should be based on ethnicity in America.

Fact is, it was donations by Asian-Americans which caused the woes for the Presidential Campaign of Bill Clinton. All one has to do is read the transcript of the hearings linked above which is public knowledge.

We are still a long way from the home stretch in 2008 in the election of a new POTUS, however, as stories such as these emerge, I feel it’s imperative we get the word out. There are no accusations here. All of this information is publicly available and can be read for each individual to come to their own conclusions. What there are though, are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding Mr. Hsu and his association with both the DNC and Mrs.Clinton.

Hopefully whatever path the investigation which has begun takes, it will yield the answers.

Update: According to today’s Wall Street Journal Mrs. Clinton may not be able to return the funds to the donors for them to promise it’s theirs and return to her campaign.

New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. That money, Mr. Rosenman told investors this week, is missing.

Mr. Hsu told Mr. Rosenman the money would be used to manufacture apparel in China for Gucci, Prada and other private labels, yielding a 40% profit on each deal, according to a business plan obtained by the Journal. Now the investment fund, Source Financing Investors, says Mr. Hsu’s company owes it the $40 million, which represents 37 separate deals with Mr. Hsu’s company. When Source Financing recently attempted to cash checks from the company, Components Ltd., the investors say they were told the account held insufficient funds. …

…Mr. Rosenberg, the attorney for Mr. Rosenman, asked politicians to hold on to the funds so that Source Financing and other investors can be made whole. “It appears that Source Financing Investors joins Hillary Clinton…and many others as his victims,” Mr. Rosenberg said in an interview. “We urge candidates who received contributions from Mr. Hsu to retain those funds so that they may be returned to victims of the scheme.”

How many innocent, regular Americans have been scammed by Hsu and their money gone into the Clinton and Democratic coffers instead of giving a return on their investment of hard-earned money?

We don’t know the answer to that question for certain yet, but if a judge rules the money cannot be distributed until this case is resolved it’s only going to put stronger legs on this story of deception.

Sweetness and Light quotes the New York Times talking about another shady contributor:

John R. Burgess makes for an improbable courtier of presidents, or of a senator who might become one.

A disbarred New York lawyer with a criminal record for attempted larceny and patronizing a 16-year-old prostitute, Mr. Burgess owns International Profit Associates, a management consulting company in Illinois.

Federal authorities are pressing a sexual harassment suit against the company on behalf of 113 former female employees.

The Illinois attorney general is investigating accusations of deceptive marketing tactics, officials say, and the company has been the subject of 470 complaints to the Better Business Bureau across the nation in the past three years.

But despite the trail of problems dating to the 1980’s, many prominent politicians have accepted campaign contributions and speaking fees from Mr. Burgess and his company, which offers organizational and financial advice, mostly to owners of small businesses, and claims annual revenues of more than $200 million.

Former President George Bush was paid $82,000 to speak at a company banquet in 1999, and former President Bill Clinton received $125,000 to appear in 2001.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has collected more than $150,000 in contributions from executives of International Profit Associates, some as recently as September, and spoke at a company event in 2004. As a group, company officials and their spouses are one of the largest sources of contributions to Mrs. Clinton’s re-election campaign.

Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton and Mrs. Clinton all say they were not aware of problems with the company, known as I.P.A., or with Mr. Burgess when they took the money, though some problems were documented as early as 1997 in newspapers, magazines and on the Internet.

Mike McIntire of Sweetness and Light then wraps up his post with these words:

Boiling it down from the NYT’s opaque text, Hillary Clinton accepted at least $157,000 in donations from a company owned by John Burgess, a disbarred New York lawyer with a criminal record for attempted larceny and patronizing a sixteen-year-old prostitute.

And when informed of this, Mrs. Bill Clinton refused to return the money. Even though other pols, like the Cuomos, were shamed into doing so.

(Mind you, this is the same Hillary Clinton who demanded that Barack Obama return contributions from David Geffen because Mr. Geffen had the temerity to call the Clintons “liars.”)

The old saying is when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. It appears both Clintons have been sleeping with dogs for a long time and are covered with fleas they are trying to eliminate now. The problem is the damage has already been done.