Confronted with new evidence about fundraiser Norman Hsu, the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton announced late Monday that it was returning $850,000 from 260 donors associated with Hsu.
The announcement was made minutes after the Los Angeles Times asked Clinton officials to respond to mid-June campaign e-mails the newspaper obtained that dismissed concerns about Hsu and his business practices.
“I can tell you with 100 certainty that Norman Hsu is not involved in a Ponzi scheme,” wrote Samantha Wolf, who had the title West Coast finance director for the campaign. “He is completely legit.”
Wolf, who has since left the campaign, wrote the e-mail in June to a party official who was asking questions about Hsu and his reputation in the financial world.
The campaign also announced it was instituting new procedures to check out major contributors.
Hsu, 56, has contributed or raised more than $1.2 million for Clinton and other Democrats.
But the Times revealed in late August that he was a fugitive wanted on a 15-year-old bench warrant from an early 1990s investment fraud case.
Hsu called the matter a misunderstanding, then failed to show at a San Mateo, Calif., County hearing. He was rearrested last week in Colorado after falling ill there on an eastbound train.
Clinton (D-N.Y.) previously had planned only to give to charity $23,000 she received from Hsu.
“In light of recent events and allegations that Mr. Norman Hsu engaged in an illegal investment scheme, we have decided out of an abundance of caution to return the money he raised for our campaign,” a statement said.
The amount that the campaign identified as raised by Hsu would make him one of her top fundraisers. Through June, her presidential campaign raised $52 million from individual contributors, second to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who raised $58.5 million.
Former President Bill Clinton, in Chicago for a fundraiser on Monday, told reporters that he did not know anything about the Hsu matter.
