Wooing donors in Chicago…
Truth be told, this story stared out with Ryan Nobles over at NBC 12’s Decision Virginia [1]:
In 2009, McAuliffe took considerable heat because much of his funding came from his vast connections outside of Virginia. In 2013, his campaign is working to change that perception. Despite several of those out of town high dollar fundraisers, McAuliffe claims that 3,600 of his donors are from Virginia, making up 72% of the contributors to his campaign.
But one donor from his last 2012 report is registered as a Virginian, but it is unclear just how deep much business they are actually doing in Virginia. It is important to point out that the McAuliffe campaign did not make the same claims about it’s Virginia based contributions in the 2012 report as they did in the 2013 report.
So who exactly is this clown? Jason Kenney (the Younger) has more details than you could ever imagine over at The Jeffersoniad [2]:
Edward Haddock has contributed over $200,000 to Terry McAuliffe’s two campaigns for Governor of Virginia. In 2009 he listed the contributions under his own name and his employer as Full Sail, Inc while using the wrong address of 805 Country Club Lane – an address only used for his contributions to Terry McAuliffe. This year a $100,000 contribution from the exact same wrong address was made in the name of Sungate Real Estate, a company Haddock runs but has never listed on any contributions, state or federal.
Why is Edward Haddock’s contribution suddenly being (poorly) hidden from public scrutiny?
McAuliffe and Haddock’s history appears to begin in investing in Richard Swann’s failed savings and loan. Richard Swann (McAuliffe’s father-in-law and a $100,000 donor to Terry’s 2009 bid) helped advise Terry McAuliffe’s Boland Group in assisting his daughter Dorothy Swann McAuliffe’s American Capital Group in the purchase of American Pioneer property for millions less than what it was worth from the Resolution Trust Corportation, which was established at the expense of taxpayers to the tune of $500 million.
McAuliffe had a 50% equity stake in the $39 million deal after having put up only $100 of the funds.
Less than a decade later, McAuliffe would make $18 million off of a $100,000 investment in Global Crossing [3] – shortly before it became the seventh largest bankruptcy in American history.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, folks.
UPDATE: The always inestimable Virginia Virtucon chimes in [4]:
A new post at The Jeffersoniad looks into the history between Terry McAuliffe and a questionable donation to his gubernatorial campaign and finds that the history goes as far back as the S&L Crisis of the late 80s.
It’s a story of campaign contributions, false addresses, millions of tax dollars, and a business history that shouldn’t fill Virginians with any level of confidence…
Ouch… what’s telling so far from the phone calls and e-mails is that no one believes this is surprising, but that everyone is convinced that the intelligence of Virginians who care about transparency is being offended in such a direct manner.