Webloggin » Obama Campaign Steps Up Efforts To Prosecute Donors Behind Anti-Obama Ad

Credit Michelle Malkin for continuing to shed light on the strong arm tactics of the Barack Obama campaign with it’s desire to shut down and actually prosecute the man behind the William Ayers anti-Obama ad. In a continuing trend of hypocrisy the Democrats continue displaying tactics typically exhibited by the likes of Hugo Chavez, Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro. The only difference is that the tactics used by Barack Obama amount to intimidation through high priced lawyers. The net result, whether or not the device is a lawyer or a gun, is that the end game seeks to shut down free speech.

Ben Smith of The Politico noted just how desperate the campaign is.

Obama general counsel Bob Bauer today sent a second, sharper letter to the Justice Department, directly attacking the Dallas billionaire funding a harsh attack ad, Harold Simmons.

“We reiterate our request that the Department of Justice fulfill its commitment to take prompt action to investigate and to prosecute the American issues Project, and we further request that the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute Howard (sic) Simmons for a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits,” he wrote.

He called the group’s activities “patently illegal.”

Bauer made the case that Simmons’ group [is not] fulfilling its [...] nonprofit charter because it hasn’t spent any money on anything other than attacking Obama. Simmons’ spokesman, Christian Pinkston, told me yesterday that plans to, and dismissed the complaints as an effort to lawyer away charges the campaign can’t rebut.

Malkin notes that the left has a vast army of George Soro’s like contributors and they can’t stand to see the same on the right. But it even goes further than that. Barack Obama is implicated in a widening scandal over $800,000 dollars in hidden payments to ACORN. So on the one hand you have Barack Obama moving to shut down a conservative opposition group and on the other you have an alleged case of funneling money illegally to a liberal “community organization” group that just happens to be working to register voters for Barack Obama. ACORN was fined by the FEC big time related to voter registration fraud. No small fine mind you, at the time it was the third largest ever issued by the FEC after ACORN was caught illegally spending over $70 million dollars to support Democratic candidates. Now they appear to be up to no good again. The hypocrisy and corruption never ceases with Democrats. The MSM is of course silent.

Not everybody is taking this stuff lying down. AIP responded to the Obama campaign’s strong arm tactics.

“Having failed in its attempts to get our legal, factual and fully-supported ad off the air, Barack Obama’s campaign now wants to put our donors in prison for exercising their right to free speech,” said Ed Martin, American Issues Project’s president. “These over-the-top bullying tactics are reminiscent of the kind of censorship one would see in a Stalinist dictatorship, with the only difference being that those guys generally had to wait until they were in power to throw people who disagreed with them into jail.”

In addition to two letters sent to the Department of Justice asking the government to investigate American Issues Project, its officers, board of directors, and donors, the Obama campaign has been contacting stations running American Issues Project’s ad in an unsuccessful attempt to compel them to pull the spot. With no success on either front, the campaign has also begun running its own ad in response. Notably, this ad fails to dispute a single fact in the American Issues Project’s initial ad.