Barry-Crooks, A distinction without a differance

Obama Refuses to Deport Fugitive Brothers Who Funneled $90,000 to His Campaign

Posted by Jammie on Mar 12, 2014 at 9:25 am

Maybe we should start talking about the Isaias brothersinstead of the Kochs.

The donations kept pouring in: hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to President Obama and more than a dozen members of Congress, carefully routed through the families of two wealthy brothers in Florida.

They had good reason to be generous. The two men, Roberto and William Isaias, are fugitives from Ecuador, which has angrily pressed Washington to turn them over, to no avail. A year after their relatives gave $90,000 to help re-elect Mr. Obama, the administration rejected Ecuador’s extradition request for the men, fueling accusations that such donations were helping to keep the brothers and their families safely on American soil.

“The Isaias brothers fled to Miami not to live off their work, something just, but to buy themselves more mansions and Rolls-Royces and to finance American political campaigns,” President Rafael Correa of Ecuador told reporters last month. “That’s what has given them protection,” he added, an allegation the Obama administration and members of Congress reject.

So we have fugitives funneling money to Obama and nobody seems to care.

Donations from the relatives of criminal suspects have proved vexing before. In 2012, Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign said it would return more than $200,000 raised by relatives of a Mexican casino magnate who had fled charges in the United States and sought a pardon to return.

The White House says that the decisions in the Isaias case are not influenced by donations.

Of course not. Even the NY Times, which reports this, is instead obsessing over the Kochs, two men who are legal citizens who’ve broken no laws. Yet these fugitives give thousands to Obama and get protection. We’re officially living in a banana republic.