Matthew Mosk At It Again

Amanda Carpenter | October 11, 2008 9:01 AM

Matthew Mosk is a Washington Post reporter who routinely bungles campaign finance stories.

Remember, he was the one who wrote the A1 story about John McCain's unscrupulous donors,

but after I checked it out it turned out three out of four of them never wrote checks to his campaign. Whoops.

He still appears to have a job though and now he's defending Barack Obama's fake and illegal foreign donors. He wants you to think this is commonplace. "Campaign finance experts say the notion that someone would donate money under a fake name is not as surprising as it might seem.," he writes. "Some donors don't want to be identified to avoid getting inundated with future requests. Others are pranksters."

No outrage. Nothing to see here.

But an AP investigation found Obama accepted at least 6,948 donations from non-military persons living outside the U.S. and determined at least three were from foreign persons. (Mosk lists this in his piece, but just in passing. Apparently, he has no interest in looking into this himself.) The GOP believes that number could be much higher since Obama had few quality controls on his internet donation site (like a way to verify passports) and most of his money comes from low-dollar donations that do not trigger and disclosure standards.

Obama orignally promised to use public financing for his campaign through the Democratic primaries, but broke his pledge. McCain using the public financing system and all his donations have been made available.