Clinton Gives Donor List To CNN Polling Company - Poll Rigged?

National Public Radio has provided what seems to be the "smoking gun" evidence of possible early campaign "poll-rigging" on the part of the Hillary Clinton for President campaign. Last year, 2007, in this blog post, here:

http://zennie2005.blogspot.com/2007/07/cnn-polling-linked-to-clinton-donor.html

I argued that CNN -- the Cable News Network -- should not be using polls that came from a company linked to Vinod Gupta, a major Clinton Donor. Gupta owns Info USA and the Opinion Research Corporation (OPC). It's the OPC that makes the polls that are reported by CNN, and those same polls early in the 2008 Democratic Presidential race gave consistently enormously high leads for Senator Clinton. Polls by the OPC were consistently high for months, even as other organizations like Gallup USA began to show Obama closing on Clinton.

Now, it's revealed in this NPR article that the Clinton campaign sold -- or rented -- their donor list (which contains 38,000 names) to Info USA and the OPC, but NPR's article does not make the extra step of explaining why InfoUSA / OPC would even need such a list. That's what this video is about. The list was rented for just $8,225, and not the six-figures it's valued to be, and the Clinton campaign did not collect the money until 11-months after the list was delivered.

Why? My assertion is that the campaign knew the payments would show up in their finance reports and thus wanted to delay this possible discovery for as long as possible. Clinton's campaign received the money on December 3rd of 2007. Does this violate any law? At first blush it does not but it's unethical nonetheless and should not be allowed. If Opinion Research Corporation calls just 1,500 of the 38,000 Clinton donor names, ORC can claim that they used a "representative sample of most likely voters" and have an outcome favorable to Clinton. However, I don't deal with the legal aspects of this problem here, that's for the next blog and video.

Meanwhile Gupta himself is in some trouble , as his activities of lending the Clintons the use of his private jet, and hiring President Bill Clinton for $3 million a year have ignited a shareholder lawsuit against Gupta. as Gupta's corporate operatives want to know what value, if any, Gupta's free-spending ways on Clinton have gained InfoUSA.

In may ways, this story is much like that of Peter Paul and Clinton , where Mr. Paul tried to hire Bill Clinton as a "rainmaker" for Stan Lee Media, and in the process never secured the employment of Clinton, while spending $2 milllion to hold a lavish gala for Hillary Clinton's Senate run.

What does this say about the Clintons and donors? Be careful not to get used; while Gupta's in trouble, Hillary campaign for President. Can Gupta count on the Clinton's to get him out of this jam? It depends.

If Gupta had a good contract with Clinton such that Bill had to submit performance reports with each invoice, then Gupta would be able to show shareholders what they got for their money; but if Gupta just gave Bill Clinton money for being Bill Clinton then Gupta's not going to make his shareholders happy at all.

Stay tuned.