Obama, Others Won't Return Ponzi Cash

The receiver in charge of recovering money for R. Allen Stanford's fleeced investors is trying to recover some $1.8 million the alleged Ponzi schemer gave to a host of political causes—but they refuse to return the money, Reuters reports. Among the holdouts: President Obama's campaign, and most of the Democrat and Republican parties' national fundraising committees, along with a who's who of other prominent individual politicians. The receiver, Ralph Janvey, got court orders against five campaigns last summer, but all have ignored them.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee received a whopping $950,000 from Stanford, while the National Republican Congressional Committee got $238,000. The Obama campaign says it already donated the $4,600 Stanford gave in 2008 to charity, but Janvey says it had no right to do so. "The money was never theirs to begin with," he says. They have no more right to the money than if they'd gotten it from "a guy who goes into a Seven Eleven and robs the store." (More Robert Allen Stanford stories.)