Bush Campaign Lies
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Bush Campaign Lie #54: Story that GOP Outsourced Fundraising to India is 'Untrue Urban Legend'
You may or may not be aware of the story that, between May 16, 2002 and July 22, 2003, the GOP outsourced part of its fundraising to India. This story was reported on the O'Franken Factor yesterday, as well as on MoveOn.org's 'Daily Mislead'.
Now, Al Franken is definitely a partisan, and MoveOn.org is certainly a partisan organization. So the Republicans are responding to the news by charging partisanship, saying
"This story is an untrue urban legend which has been traversing the nether regions of cyber space for the better part of a year. It’s unfortunate that John Kerry’s supporters have so little regard for the truth that they would spread Internet stories with no basis in fact," said RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke.Yeah, I hate it when a political campaign shows no regard for the truth. The thing is, I'm not so sure that the Hindustan Times is a partisan Kerry supporter. And Asia Times Online independently confirmed the story.
This isn't really news. Buzzflash mentioned this story in February 2003, citing an Indian business journal, the Business Standard, as their source (unfortunately, that link appears to be dead, but someone was nice enough to cut-and-paste it into freerepublic). And the RNC have repeatedly denied the reports for the past 15 months.
That's to be expected. But in every denial I've seen, the RNC only denies any association with HCL Technologies, the Indian firm which did the fundraising, which may be perfectly true. However, the Hindustan Times article makes it clear that the RNC originally contracted with Capital Communications Group in Washington, D.C., who then outsourced the contract. I haven't yet seen an RNC denial which addresses this specific point.
It boils down to this. You can believe the RNC denials, incomplete though they are, or you can believe the two non-partisan Indian news sources which came upon the story independently of one another, and the third impartial news source which independently confirmed it.
