The UK Telegraph reports:

Some digging from Rennie (a lawyer and former Connecticut state legislator) reveals that as well as there being a cloud over Dodd’s properties in Connecticut and Washington DC, considerable murkiness surrounds the financial arrangements for the purchase of his “cottage”.

As Rennie outlines, Dodd became part owner of the 10-acre Galway property in 1994 along with Missouri businessman William Kessinger, whom Dodd knew through investor Edward R. Downe Jnr, who had pleaded guilty the previous year to insider trading charges. The mortgage was listed as “between $100,001 and $250,000″.

Downe was a witness to Kessinger’s purchase.In 2001, Dodd circumvented the US Justice Department to help get his pal Downe a full pardon on President Bill Clinton’s last day in office. The following year, Dodd bought off Kessinger’s two-thirds share of the “cottage” for, Dodd said, $127,000.

Ever since then, Dodd has continued to list the value of the property as “between $100,001 and $250,000″.

Check out the picture of Dodd’s “cottage” (provided to me by Rennie), where he spends summers and which is looked after during the rest of the year by a caretaker. It’s not exactly the humble tumbledown abode with a leaky thatched roof, a fireplace with peat thrown on it and donkey tethered outside that the Senator might like you to envisage.
The nearby village of Roundstone is a celebrity hangout. When he’s there, the Sunday Times reported in 2007, he’s likely to “rub shoulders with [RTE's] Pat Kenny, Bill Whelan of Riverdance, Lochlann Quinn, the former AIB chairman, and the singer Brian Kennedy”.

Given the Irish property boom, a conservative estimate would be that the house would be worth approaching $1 million, and very possibly much more than that.

Hat Tip: The Corner

Judicial Watch wants the Election Cops at the FEC to go after Elton John for hosting a concert-fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.

“Recent news reports suggest that Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton for President have accepted an in-kind contribution from a foreign national, Sir Elton John, in contravention of federal election laws,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton wrote in an April 14 letter to the Office of the General Counsel for the FEC.

It’s not that a foreign citizen gave his own money to a presidential campaign. It’s that he organized a concert and encouraged American citizens to give their own money to a presidential campaign. Our crazy election laws forbid this activity. And of course, we have John McCain, President Bush, and ”reform”-minded Democrats to thank for that.

Should this land of liberty allow this kind of political expression? I say, yes! If voters don’t like it, then can demand Hillary return the money or not vote for her because of the influence of this foreign national. (I admit, Sir Elton strikes me as quite “foreign”).

I think our election laws need a little Philadelphia Freedom.