Clinton Camp: Obama Falsely Claims He Doesn't Take Oil Money

A new memo out from the Clinton campaign:

False Advertising: New Obama Ad Falsely Claims He Does Not Accept Money From Oil Companies

Phil Singer: "It's unfortunate that Senator Obama is using false advertising to explain why he can be trusted to do something about energy prices. Senator Obama says he doesn't take campaign contributions from oil companies but the reality is that Exxon, Shell, and others are among his donors. I wonder if they'll fix the ad."

A new ad by Sen. Obama running in Pennsylvania falsely claims that Sen. Obama does not accept money from the oil industry. In the ad, Sen. Obama says "I'm Barack Obama and I don't take money from oil companies or lobbyists and I won't let them block change anymore."

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Sen. Obama has received over $160,000 from the oil and gas companies. Two major bundlers for his campaign -- George Kaiser and Robert Cavnar - are oil company CEOs. Sen. Obama has accepted money from Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron and just about every other major oil company. Just last month, Sen. Obama accepted another $8,400 from ExxonMobil, $12,370 from Chevron and $6,500 from British Petroleum.

In 2005, Sen. Obama voted for the Dick Cheney energy bill, which was written in secret with the oil industry. Hillary Clinton opposed Cheney's energy bill, has a plan to eliminate oil industry tax breaks, and would require oil companies to contribute to a $50 billion strategic energy fund to jumpstart research and investment in clean energy technologies.

Here's the ad:

Comments

[mimundo]

The Clinton campaign and Huffington Post needs to check their source. According to Center for Progressive Politics site www.opensecrets.org 99% of Obama's campaign contributions are from indivdiuals. Now it is possible employees from BP, Exxon, etc. have contributed but his campaign as individuals but the site does not document contributions on behalf of those companies.

Here's the link
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/summary.asp?ID=N00009638&Cycle=2008

Furthermore, Hillary has a lot of nerve. She has accepted more than $1,000,000 in Political Action Committee (PAC) money.

[AndrewInToronto]

Precisely !

[Changeizgood]

Get real Hilbot, youguys are good at doingstuff and saying Obama did it. It reminds me of siblings when one does something and when asked about it, points at the innocent child. Stop the madness, you evil tempered,pms schizophenic Feminazi's.

[FancyPantsElitist]

You are responding under the wrong response, Change. this person is defending Obama

[JWLANDSCAPES]

TIT FOR TAT TIT FOR TAT TIT FOR TAT

Obama may not have as long a history of taking money for the sake of paying for political capitol or giving political favors for money, but the history of it is none the less there and debunks his campaign of "change" Call Monopoly whatever you want, but the pieces are still the same. A statistical tie, and not a mandate for either candidate for the nomination. However you look at it, Obama is in trouble with the upcoming states. He won't win PA, KY, IN, WV and the well timed endorsement of EDWARDS before the NC primary will seal the deal. Bye Obama, you gave a valiant effort. To beat a Clinton you have to play like a Clinton, but who do you think wrote this book? You may be able to plagiarize on paper and in speeches, but you can't plagiarize what you lack in experience and connections.

Bye Obama!

[utd]

Are you people high? You can read numbers right? She is LOSING traction becasue of doing PRECISELY this kind of thing. Especially after the Bosnia thing the media is going into hawk mode to debunk every word that comes out of her campaign so they can point to the pattern. Hillary is handing Obama the nom more and more everyday. Keep dreaming if you like though.

[mamamay]

Hil winning these states or some of them proves nothing more than these states were primarily going to go to a white candidate, anyway because the idea of going for a man/woman of color has not really caught on. However, by November, when it counts, Obama will do just fine.. He will beat JMcC. hands down. Did you know if Hil was not in this Primary, these states would go for Obama? He is really the man for the Job, and I hope that you will catch on and stop thinking loser. We will win, With Obama, we will win.

[LightningJoe]

Yeah, hold your breath for THAT, dude (har!)

[FrankBlackFrancis]

With Democrats like you, who needs Republicans?

[FancyPantsElitist]

Proof? Links? You have NONE.

I think you will be surprised in PA. Why is it the supporters of Hillary lie like she does? Why do they accept her tactics?

[SCharb]

UGGGGGGH!!! Hillary Clinton is some sort of evil bizzaro Mike Huckabee.

[bsworld]

Hillary and her camp are truely pathetic!!! Hillary was caught in a major, major lie and instead of being honorable about it, she tries to put Obama back in the spot light, who, I might add dealt with his situation head on unlike her sorry ass!!! Now this! I really hope the american people are smarter than that!!! It is a set up to once again take the heat off her negative rising polls percentage. Alot of people dislike her because she is so dishonest and full of crap!!! I would never vote for her!

[Oldtt]

If Hillary Clinton stated on the campaign trail that she read about something in the NYT and it turns out that WaPo actually ran the story, you and other Obama lovers would be screaming at the top of your lungs that she had been caught in a major, major lie. Your outrage is totally phony, this is a zero issue, and your only motive here is to take a minor memory gaffe and turn it into some kind of a monstrous crime dwarfing the holocaust. Exactly how long are you planning on riding this dead horse? If you want to promote your candidate and attack Clinton, why not cite what you see as major policy differences. If you say Clinton is dead wrong on some issue or another, that's reasonable. When you keep on howling about character defects, or accusing her of racism, or taking other personal cheap shots that have absolutely nothing to do with any of the real problems facing the next President, you are only contributing to the noise level, not effectively advocating for Obama.

[indie17]

"Experience never exists in isolation; it is always a factor that coexists with temperament, training, background, spiritual outlook, and a host of other factors. Character is your magic word it seems to me..." -- Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith

[juevosrancheros]

A minor memory gaffe? Tell me, please, whether you would misremember being shot at. The issue is that it has to do with her tendency to be truthful, and - since she is running on a platform of 'experience' - whether she is being truthful in particular about that 'experience'.

[LightningJoe]

"Minor memory gaffe?" Are you kidding? What's either minor or memory, about misrepresenting private contributions by people who pump gas, as being lobbied contributions from Big Oil? They looked at some table of figures, to come up with the numbers for this ad, didn't they? Those figures were labeled somehow, weren't they?

We know with some certainty here, that those figures were listed under something like "individual private contributi­ons." An honest person, bent on portraying reality accurately, could not construe that to mean "money from big oil companies.­"

There's really not much room for interpretation here. Hillary Camp's excuses for this lie boil down to "we had no idea what we were reading," or "we were stoned when we said that."

Really, the strategies invoked by Hillary supporters lately look a lot like those employed by the NeoCons. It doesn't argue well for Hillary, that the only things she has left are dirty tricks, and a pool of supporters who will aid and abet her use of them.

And you couldn't be more wrong, if you think her use of such dishonest tactics has nothing to do with what kind of president she would be.

-----
stop watching tv -- PLEASE!

[FrankBlackFrancis]

Sorry you are so confused. This is an important issue as it illustrates that team Clinton is willing to lie to smear Obama. Your accusation is unfounded. A major lie would be her dodging bullets in Bosnia. Mixing up papers is no big deal. It's you are reaching here. I can't speak for everybody but many of us actually support Obama because it appears he has won the nomination, not that he's simply not Hillary. Get over yourself. Talk about beating the dead horse.

[MaineMike]

Someone should tell the Clintons that it is not 1992.

Perhaps in 1992 they could send out false claims and assume that the average person did not have the resources to verify their claims.

Today anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can verify this stuff and easily determine that their claims are false.

[bsworld]

Hillary you and your camp will do anything to try and sabotage Obama! The american people have had enough IF they are smart. You are so pathetic. I hope you lose the nomination and fall off the face of the earth. The thought of such a deceitful, slimy, conniving, cynical, untrustworthy, disgusting, and sad person as such as yourself becoming president just makes me want to puke!!!!!!!!!


Obama 08

[Oldtt]

It's impossible to fall off the face of the earth. For even more derogatory adjectives to throw at Clinton, get yourself a good thesaurus. If you want to puke, you are in the minority but go ahead.

[LightningJoe]

Puking not required. We'll win this one in a walk.

[FrankBlackFrancis]

Let it go, it's ok, she lost, Obama is a good candidate. They're not that different, except Hillary seems content to do damage to her own party.

[BeyondGoodAndEvil]

This lie from the Clinton campaign has already been debunked:
http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/3/28/145339/267

[JeffinIllinois]

It's not oil money that Obama takes.. it's money from Excelon to shut up about the leaking nuclear reactor we have here in Illinois.

[JWLANDSCAPES]

Thank you Jeff! I'm in Chicago, and trust me, Senator Obama has lost my vote when he runs for reelection when he finally COMPLETES his first term.

He lied to us when he said he wouldn't run in 2008. He lied about his work on the nuclear transportation bill he said he got through congress, as it was water-down to ineffectiv­eness...ju­st more beaurocracy!

I'm terribly disappointed in this junior political hack.

[justobserve]

Hillary tolde Newyorkers she will not run in 2008 too! As did Bill Clinton when he was Arkansas' Governor .

[eliandbo]

This country needs a re-call law, if we are lied to ,to get into office!

[treadway123]

That's crap, and you kknow it. The people from exon and mobil have a right to donate to him. they do so as employees and some time as a group of employees. That isn't excepting money from big oil company's and you know what, Clinton will say and do any thing to muddy Obama, even after the big wigs ask her to stop before she damages the party.

[SShaw490]

He didn't take "money from Execelon" - he took contributions from Excelon employees. And it's a good thing, because he caused them a lot of grief with his efforts to force them to report even low level leaks - he wasn't successful with the legislation because the chairman of the Senate environmental oversight committee was the most rabid anti-environmental Republican (Daniel Inoue). So if he'd taken a bunch of Excelon money and then tried to pass legislation that was bad for them - and DID, in fact, bring some negative publicity about them forward - then he's not very good at being bribed.

One other thing - Hillary co-sponsored Obama's legislation and she's also taken contributions from Excelon employees. Face it, there's no story here.

[amberpnkrckr]

HuffPost seems about as slow in seeing new spin and lies from the Clintons as Hillary supporters are that the race is over and she's lost. The New York Times already dismissed this false Clinton attack:

"Mr. Singer shouldn’t hold his breath. Bill Burton, press secretary for the Obama campaign, reaffirmed the ad’s message, saying “Senator Obama is the only candidate in the race who doesn’t accept campaign contributions from special interests PACs and Washington lobbyists, and that includes oil companies and oil lobbyists.­”

“The energy bill that Senator Clinton has already been criticized for misrepresenting — one that Clinton supporters Representatives Murtha and Kanjorski also backed — actually raised taxes on oil companies and made the largest investment in renewable energy in our nation’s history,” said Mr. Burton in a statement. “Instead of continuing with the negative and misleading tactics that voters everywhere are rejecting, Senator Clinton should get behind the Obama plan to ease the burden of rising gas prices on working families.”­"

This Clinton whopper reminds me of the It reminds me of their "Obama isn't a professor" lie.

[AnninCA]

His big project there. *whew*

[everydog]

all he has to say is he misspoke! and lost a lot of sleep!!

[stefanielaine]

Hmm. I work for a health insurance company, and I donate often to Obama. Does that mean he takes money from "the health insurance industry?" Come on. I'm an individual who happens to work for a major health insurance company. I also think that we should have single-payer universal health care, and that the company I work for shouldn't exist. But for the time being, I am doing good, important work that helps people, and I am giving my hard-earned money to Obama. If Hillary wants to use my donations to allege that Obama is somehow taking money from health insurance companies, well, that just breaks my heart. But it won't be the first time her dirty tactics have broken my heart and it certainly won't be the last.

[LightningJoe]

stefanie, thanks for being a person who can separate her livelihood from what the country needs. We need many more like you.

I lived in Oregon when the spotted owl frak was coming down, and saw how hard it was on the timber towns. I now live in Alaska, and know how hard it was up here when logging was cut back. The truth is, the world changes, like it or not. And the fact is that we NEED to change, or we'll destroy the world as we know it.

Consciousness evolves, and opens facts to our ken, that we had no idea of before. We don't have the luxury of ignoring reality just because it's inconvenient. We HAVE to adapt our ways to our new understandings, or the great experiment of intelligent life will end before it's begun.

Faux Noose is the premier head-in-the-sand force, but people are slowly getting it, that we really have no choice but to tackle our problems head-on, rather than run screaming, back into some mythical golden past that never was as good as it seemed anyway.

Keep your chin up, and...

----
stop watching tv.

[TNFarmer]

Hillary, quite frankly, to quote Rhett, most of us "Quite frankly, don't give a damn...." what you and your camp say anymore. Even if Obama did take oil money, it's a drop in the bucket compared to your special interest connections and coffers. Please, take your venom and go home to Arkansas and write your memoirs of Bosnia and similar trips. Title your work, "If I did it" - oh, that's another best seller's title, sorry.

[KDH]

The point is not so much that he took oil money, it's that he lied about taking it. This shows once again that his claim of "A New Kind of Politics" is BS.

[DinSea]

Again - where do you get your facts? Taking money from an oil company employee is NOT THE SAME as taking money from the big bad company!! We all need jobs - do we not send in a campaign contribution because we pump Exxon gas at the corner gas station? Or because we are a corporate giant making a PERSONAL donation? DUH!

[AlabamaGunn]

He didn't lie about it. Individuals are not corporations. Instead of studying Hillary's propaganda, do some research.

[JWLANDSCAPES]

Problem is, he lies just as much and is your standard run of the mill politician. Regardless what you would like to believe, or he makes you believe. His whole platform is a fabrication and purely a piece of fiction.,

[DinSea]

And your fact base is what? Obviously you have not done your homework. Your comments sound like a spoon-fed media/Clinton hate parrot. You should know by now that you have to do some research to get to the truth - but then again, that would take some responsibility and you would have to push a few buttons on your computer in order to find out the real story.

It's easy to hate. It takes a little something more to seek the TRUTH and to understand the difference between "experienced" corrupt politicians as opposed to a fresh, positively motivated campaign. Really hard to fight clean when so many alley rats are chewing up the truth.

[AlabamaGunn]

Hillary's full of honesty, integrity, and is certainly not a run of the mill politician, nine out of ten Hillary supporters agree!

[MsLiz]

Give us an example, and links to back it up.

[FrankBlackFrancis]

Yes, this is a great tactic. He lies just as much as she does. Kind of reminds me of Bush apologists who always say Bill did it too! To explain away any malfeasance. Come to think of it, Hillary's campaign and her supporters remind me more of rabid Republicans every day.

[LightningJoe]

Second that, JWLANDSCAPES, and links to back it up. You can't get away with sh*t here, bub; if you sharpen a post, you'll get yourself impaled on it.

Troll alert, JWLANDSCAPES, first warning shot....

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stop watching tv.

[2351]

Everyone who knows how to read and really wants to know the facts know that those oil contributions did not come from the actual oil company, but from employees who work for the oil companies, which is legal. That was something that the Hillary camp posted on Obama's website trying to make people think that he was lying. It is like crabs in a bucket. Everytime he tries to pull himself up and move on, she tries to pull him back down in the bucket with her. Would you be disappointed if you knew that this was a lie fed to you by the Hillary campaign? Don't you think that this issue would have been already on You Tube?

[simplify]

Where is her tax returns????

[IndependentTogether]

... and her earmarks????

[AnninCA]

Her earmarks are public info. Now, we also know he bought his latest bump in income....­...*hootin­g*

Mr. Honest.

[AlabamaGunn]

With the cigars...

[Alessan]

Where are your tax returns, if Hillary becomes the President you will see her tax returns otherwise you won't, they are simply NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS at the moment.

[indie17]

Yes, her tax returns are our business. And she is going to release them around April 15th.

[juevosrancheros]

Ummm, I think her returns ARE our business. The American people have a right to expect transparency from our civil servants. Earmark accounts, donor lists, tax returns from the past seven years ... these all matter greatly.

[Titonwan]

Not only is pimped out Chelsea defending her mammy with "none of your business crap", now Schillary's ranting fans are defending her tax follies! Wowee. :o

[FrankBlackFrancis]

Are you serious? None of our business? She owes us her returns long before she becomes President as does any candidate. To suggest otherwise is plain nuts.

[rosal]

Her tax returns are everybody's business. Where is her money coming from? A politician reveals her income sources, before the election, not after. Nobody wants to vote for a corrupted politican and then have buyer's remorse for four years. If she is clean, she'll release her documents. She who hides nothing, fears nothing.

[jazzence]

Well at least when can review his tax returns and contributions.

[northeast73]

Yeah, because THAT is what people really care about.

You know, the Clintons income information is a matter of public record with the Senate Ethics committee.


Of course the media never informs you of this. Its better if you think she is "secretive"

[MaineMike]

It is my understanding that those records only provide general information and not the detail that would be found in a tax return.

[SShaw490]

The contributions to Bill Clinton's foundations are not a matter of public record with the Senate Ethich committee - or any other reporting group that I know of. And if the Clinton family tradition of taking money for access is to continue, then Bill's foundations are the perfect conduit for that.

[butterworth]

"You know, the Clintons income information is a matter of public record with the Senate Ethics committee.­"

The Senate Disclosure Forms she is required submit are considerably less detailed than tax returns + schedules.

[simplify]

The Clinton campaign will learn the hard way that going negative on Obama is not going to work.
Like their denial about his professoship in the U. of Chicago this claim will be seen for what it is another low ball insignificant attack by the Clinton campaign

[Grunty1]

If Hillary and Co. were capable of learning this, then they would have by now.

[jkminwa]

They won't learn as long as there are people to believe the stories they tell.

[Barackanot]

It doesn't matter whether or not Hillary takes money from lobbyist or big business -- she never said she didn't. However, Barack's claim that he doesn't take money from lobbyist, et. is nothing but a lie. I have worked for companies that made political contribution in my name and on my behalf. If anyone thinks these contributions are coming from individuals within the organization you too uninformed to be voters. Yes, he stopped taking money from PAC when he started his presidential campaign -- big deal, an ulterior motive as always. Face it. He's a liar. And those of you who think the "open secrets" site proves that Obama hasn't taken money from lobbyist had better check out some of those law firms -- they are lobbyist pure and simple.

[openmindnheart]

Ugh... Until you have video of him taking money, or canceled checks etc, he is not a liar. Saying you ran under sniper fire when you did not and it is caught on tape. You are a liar. When you get caught and say you misspoke, you are a liar. When you tell a reporter, that you are not Tammy Wynet and stand by your man, you are a liar. When you take 2 million dollar donation by having a fundraiser put on the show and you are on tape speaking with them about the event then deny when you get caught, you are a liar. When you push so hard to be come the nominee to avoid indictment in california for campaign fraud, you are a criminal.

[Oldtt]

Based on your interpretation of events cited, Hillary Clinton has never spoken the truth in her entire life, and her every act has been criminal. Do you actually believe this tripe? If so, you have a clinical obsession and require immediate treatment. If not, you have a bad case of mendacity, which strikes 9 of 10 Obama supporters and is untreatable.

[IsobelDeBrujah]

If your company contributed to the Obama campaign in your name they were required to affirm that

"This contribution is not made from the general treasury funds of a corporation, labor organization or national bank.
This contribution is not made from the funds of a political action committee.
This contribution is not made from the treasury of an entity or person who is a federal contractor.
This contribution is not made from the funds of an individual registered as a federal lobbyist or a foreign agent, or an entity that is a federally registered lobbying firm or foreign agent.
The funds I am donating are not being provided to me by another person or entity for the purpose of making this contributi­on."

You committed fraud, as did anyone who allowed their company to circumvent Senator Obama's efforts to prevent PACs and big business from contributing to his campaign.

[MsLiz]

Is it legal for you to allow a corporation to make campaign donations in your name? Aren't you party to a fraud?