Federal prosecutors yesterday charged one of city Comptroller John Liu’s top fund-raisers with conspiracy and attempted wire fraud — implicating members of Liu’s campaign staff in crimes and making his continuance in office untenable.
According to the feds, Liu’s pal Xing Wu Pan took $16,000 from an undercover FBI agent and concocted a scheme to donate it to Liu’s presumed 2013 mayoral campaign, using a network of “straw donors” who took the money and then gave Liu the cash under their own names.
The plan appears to be devised to get around campaign-finance laws limiting the size of contributions, and also to trigger public matching funds, which would provide Liu another $1,050 per listed donor.
City campaign laws are an invitation to fraud: If three people each donate the maximum individual contribution of $4,950, a candidate gets $18,000 in donations and matching funds. But if those donations are instead parceled out by 20 straw donors, the way Pan arranged, the haul more than doubles to about $37,000.
It was revealed Monday that Liu is under investigation for leaning on other phantom donors, and that just last week the feds subpoenaed his campaign over suspicious contributions from employees of a Queens contractor, including some who don’t exist.
Here’s the bottom line: As comptroller, Liu is entrusted with overseeing New York’s $100 billion pension funds and is the watchdog for the city’s $65 billion budget.
So he’s either too dumb to keep track of a few thousand dollars on his own books, in which case he isn’t qualified to be comptroller — or he’s lying, and thus too crooked to hold any city office.
This time, Liu can’t play dumb: He has longstanding ties to Pan, who donated $3,000 to his 2009 comptroller campaign, and who arranged for the undercover agent to have a personal meeting with Liu and his top lieutenants, according to the feds.
At the meeting, Pan indicated to Liu with a wink and a nod, that the money was coming from the undercover agent. And the campaign was clearly savvy to the set-up: When a check from a straw donor bounced, Liu’s campaign treasurer e-mailed Pan about the money, instead of contacting the donor for the cash.
Indicating, perhaps, that they understood Pan’s arrangement, and embraced it.
Yesterday we called on Liu to step aside until the feds finish their investigations of his 2009 and 2013 campaigns.
That is no longer nearly enough. Given Pan’s arrest and the crimes he admits he committed, Liu is irretrievably tainted.
He needs to step down immediately.