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ONE reason Democrats on the Senate committee investigating campaign-finance abuses seem so unutterably obtuse may be that they are guilty of some of the same fundraising shenanigans practiced by the Clinton White House and the Democratic National Committee.

The crime central to almost all the cases uncovered so far is using shell contributors to mask what would otherwise be illegal contributions-that is the case at the Buddhist temple, with the Lums, with Ron Brown’s son, and the bags of checks delivered to the Clinton legal-defense fund. Federal Election Commission records from the last election show signs that three Democratic senators-Bob Torricelli (N.J.), Carl Levin (Mich.), and Dick Durbin (Ill.) may have accepted $83,000 worth of similar “pass-through” contributions, in this case, via the real donors’ offspring.

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David Mastio

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ONE reason Democrats on the Senate committee investigating campaign-finance abuses seem so unutterably obtuse may be that they are guilty of some of the same fundraising shenanigans practiced by the Clinton White House and the Democratic National Committee.

The crime central to almost all the cases uncovered so far is using shell contributors to mask what would otherwise be illegal contributions-that is the case at the Buddhist temple, with the Lums, with Ron Brown’s son, and the bags of checks delivered to the Clinton legal-defense fund. Federal Election Commission records from the last election show signs that three Democratic senators-Bob Torricelli (N.J.), Carl Levin (Mich.), and Dick Durbin (Ill.) may have accepted $83,000 worth of similar “pass-through” contributions, in this case, via the real donors’ offspring.