Gee, what a Clinton coincidence

Funny how these things happen. It's probably maybe a coincidence. Perhaps.

But when The Times called Hillary Clinton's campaign this afternoon to say it had e-mails showing internal concerns about their major fundraiser Norman Hsu's reputation, it took all of five minutes for the Clinton folks to announce that they were returning $850,000 from 260 different donors associated with Hsu.

Yet these e-mails have been available to the campaign since June.

The Times revealed a week ago that Hsu, who has raised millions for various Democrats including Sens. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Edward Kennedy and Dianne Feinstein, was a fugitive from California authorities on a swindling charge.

It took two days then for Clinton to say she would donate $23,000 from Hsu to charity and for Hsu to say he would stop raising money. Initially, Howard Wolfson, a Clinton spokesman, said, "During Mr. Hsu's many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question or to return them."

Hsu subsequently turned himself into authorities, posted $250,000 in bail and then vanished again.

He was re-arrested in Colorado after falling ill on a train and remains in a Grand Junction hospital under FBI guard.

In a mid-June e-mail to a party official, Clinton's West Coast campaign finance director, Samantha Wolf, wrote of the 56-year-old Hsu, "He is COMPLETELY legit." Wolf has since also left the campaign.

In their hasty announcement today, Clinton campaign officials said they were instituting even newer procedures to examine the background of major contributors including criminal checks. Even cursory examination of easily available public records, however, would have raised red flags over Hsu's financial and legal activities.

--Andrew Malcolm