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Those who are asking President Obama to release his vault copy of his birth certificate have also been seeking his college records as well. The college records from Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, including the financial aid information, would provide further support as to President Obama’s citizenship, eligibility, and candor regarding some of his prior questionable associations.
Articles such as the following reflect the compelling interest of the electorate’s right to the information:
Obama’s Harvard Years: Questions Swirl |
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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Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told Newsmax that Sutton’s account was “bogus” and a “fabrication that has been retracted” by a spokesman for the Sutton family.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. |
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“Transparency”, “Open”, “Different Kind of Campaign”
These are all words and phrases that Sen. Barack Obama has used to describe the type of candidate that he wanted to be in this election. Sen. McCain has been accused of running a negative attack campaign, and inciting racial tones. Yet McCain has refrained from discussing Rev. Wright, and has pointed NOT to Obama’s ties to terrorist Bill Ayers BUT to Obama’s lack of candor about the alliance with Ayers, ACORN, and others. Obama, on the other hand, has not been followed through on his statements and promises of being “open and transparent.”
Obama training for ACORN
Would you vote for Obama if you knew he was a member of the Socialist Party, known in Chicago in the 90′s as the New Party?
On numerous websites that had been in Google’s archives, articles about Obama’s ties to the Socialist agenda through the New Party and the Democratic Socialists of America have been well documented. It seems that Obama forgot to have those scrubbed from the World Wide Web.
Would you vote for a Obama if you knew that he is refusing to release his school records from Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard?
The campaigns for the Presidency are like a job interview, and most applications, you not only list past work experience, but you education as well. In addition to that, to apply for Bar membership, these documents would have to be provided as well.
It has been well written that John McCain did not graduate at the top of his class at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. In fact it was near the bottom. There are conflicting reports about Obama’s educational skills, and whether his academic history at Columbia was sufficient to have qualified for admission to Harvard without Khalid Al-Mansour asking Percy Sutton of New York to write a letter on behalf of Obama due to Sutton’s Harvard connections.
Would you vote for Obama if you knew that he has refused to produce his “vault” birth certificate to be verified, but instead posted a forged document in conjunction with the leftist blogsite Daily Kos?
While I find David Axelrod to be arrogant and obnoxious, I am sure that he is intelligent enough to have foreseen that with Obama’s biography, there were going to be questions about his heritage, his lineage, his citizenship.
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that the only media that the Obama team addressed the birth certificate issue with was the Daily Kos, especially when mainstream media is fawning over him. Unless the production of the vault birth certificate and his Indonesian records are going to reveal more untruths, like his initial Ayer’s answers, then it would seem that it would be most prudent to simply supply the information.
Obviously, with the increased traffic on attorney Philip Berg’s website regarding his lawsuit challenging Obama’s eligibility to run for POTUS, it would seem that the interest in the answer to this part of Obama’s biography are finally growing. With 22 days until the election, if Obama is elected, we could be facing a Constitutional Crisis that could have been avoided by his openness and the media doing their job of vetting the candidate.
Would you vote for Obama if you knew that he has downplayed his role in ACORN, or that his campaign gave ACORN $832,000 for voter registration assistance (which the campaign initially reported as an expense for sound and lighting; “an error”), and ACORN’s activities are now being investigated in at least 12 states?
The ACORN investigations cannot be labeled as partisan attacks. The Nevada investigation was begun at the behest of a Democratic Secretary of State. ACORN was active in Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign. in 1992, Obama said he worked with Project Vote in the Chicago area on voter registrations, not ACORN. However, both organizations’ records show they were at the same location.
So, what exactly is the bottomline? To ask these questions is not stoking the coals of racism! To ask these questions is to verify the thin resume of a candidate whose record does not support the claims that he has made in his campaign. Because the economy has become a major focal point, and because McCain is a member of the party that presently occupies the White House, the Democratic candidate is bolstered by those main factors. But with such lack of candor from Obama, he should not receive the “free pass” that the media and the Democratic party have so freely issued to him.
Louis Farrakhan may claim him as the Messiah, but to average Joe SixPack, he still needs to provide proof to back up his just words!!
More than 2500 days have passed since the extreme Islamic jihadists, at the direction of Osama bin Laden, attacked the United States on our own soil. Whatever else that is said or blamed upon the Bush administration, he can receive credit for leading a positive war on terrorism.
It is that war on terrorism that has caused us to look at things more carefully, perhaps more cynically. For just that reason, the very fact that Sen. Obama has chosen during 21 months of campaigning to downplay any mere mention of his ties with William Ayers or the Syrian born Tony Rezko, his relationship with Rashid Khalidi, or why Percy Sutton of NY was asked by Kahlid Al-Mansour to write a letter of recommendation to Harvard for Obama (who Sutton says he did not know), are important questions to be addressed. They are just as important as the issues of the economy and health care, since they are at the heart of national security. Is the implication that Obama is a terrorist? Probably not, at least not in the sense that we envision. But terrorism can be done in many ways, not just in the militant means of Bill Ayers.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi
The following synopsis and link were sent to me earlier today. I submit them as “food for thought”:
HAS AMERICA BEEN BO-JACKED?
IS Barack Obama ‘THE CHOSEN ONE’ ?
OsamaBinLaden targeted democracy and capitalism, when he bombed the World Trade Center, killing innocent civilians.
OBL says he will destroy us.
Is it possible that we have Iran, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea & China either working together to cause financial meltdown in the USA, AND/or working independently to do the same?
Is this financial crisis our SUICIDE BOMB? And WHO launched it?
Is Barack Obama another type of BOMB created to destroy DEMOCRACY and CAPITALISM?
What is a “home grown terrorist”, actually?
I found this interesting article, written by Reverend Ted Pike who has spent some time searching for the definition of “home grown terrorist”. He seems to think that those of us who are fighting AGAINST socialism, could be somehow defined as TERRORISTS based on his research!
How do YOU interpret this article?
http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/insearchofhomegrownterrorists.htm
Quoting Bill O’Reilly: “What say You!!!”??
Dr. Khalid Al-Mansour
