Unes dadades que els dos candidats han estalviat a l'opinió pública, com ara les declaracions fiscals, algunes donacions de campanya o, fins i tot, els seus expedients universitaris. La publicació digital nord-americana Politico destaca els 10 punts que amaguen dels dos candidats.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has boasted of his time working as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago. But the boutique law firm that employed him for parts of 11 years — now known as Miner, Barnhill & Galland — also handled matters that don’t fit under the civil rights umbrella, including contracts, real estate deals, incorporations and civil defense.
Obama, by some accounts, spent as much as 30 percent of his 3,700 billable hours on the last category.
Neither his campaign nor the firm will release a list of the cases on which he worked.
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt asserted that “Sens. Obama and Biden have taken voluntary transparency steps as legislators and candidates that have allowed their constituents, the media and their political opponents to fully examine both men.”
LaBolt pointed to lists of hundreds of the firm’s clients that Obama attached to the mandatory personal financial disclosure statements he filed for each of his eight years in the Illinois state Senate.
Included on the firm’s client list was Rezmar, a development company co-owned by Obama’s disgraced former fundraiser, Tony Rezko, as well as developer William Moorehead. Moorehead was convicted of stealing more than $1 million from public housing projects he managed and developments he co-owned with Obama’s former boss, Allison S. Davis. Some of the thefts occurred while Moorehead was a client of the firm.
Obama billed between five and seven hours to Rezmar-linked projects, including incorporating nonprofits connected to the company, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Obama’s campaign declined to answer when Politico asked if he did any work for Moorehead.
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After John McCain couldn’t immediately recall in an interview how many houses he and Cindy owned, the couple’s finances become an issue in the race, with Obama hammering McCain for being out of touch with regular folks’ economic concerns.
But beyond property records (which showed that Cindy McCain owns eight homes) and mandatory disclosure statements filed by John McCain (which showed that he owns relatively little, while Cindy and her children hold assets worth at least $24 million), McCain has been comparatively unforthcoming about his wealth.
McCain, who maintains separate finances from his wife, released his full tax returns for 2006 and 2007, while Cindy McCain, heiress to a beer distributorship fortune worth as much as $100 million, only released the first two pages of her returns for those years.
Biden and Palin also have released only two years worth of their tax returns, but their finances are substantially less robust than the McCain’s. In the years since it’s become de rigueur for presidential candidates to release their tax returns, only Ronald Reagan in 1980 disclosed less tax information than McCain.
Obama, by contrast, has released his returns dating back to 2000.
