More about Obama / Al Mansour:

   Newsmax contacted the Dean of Students, the Director of Student Financial Services, the Registrar, and the Bursar of Harvard Law School. None would provide any specific information on Barack Obama's time at Harvard, except for his dates of attendance (1988-1991) or his year of graduation, 1991. A spokesman for the law school, Michael Armini, said it was Harvard policy not to divulge information on alumni without their approval. "There are lots of reporters nosing around the library," he acknowledged. So far, none had turned up any new information.Law professors Lawrence Tribe and Charles Ogletree have both said publicly that they were "impressed" by Obama when he was a student.Sources close to the Sutton family told Newsmax that Percy Sutton wrote a letter of recommendation for Obama to Ogletree at Khalid Al-Mansour's request, but Ogletree declined to answer Newsmax questions about this. Harvard Law School spokesman Michael Armini said that Harvard was "very generous" with financial aid, but only on the basis on need.
   The Obama campaign told Newsmax that Obama self-financed his three years at Harvard Law School with loans, and did not receive any scholarship from Harvard Law School. LaBolt denied that Obama received any financial assistance from Harvard or from outside parties. "No - he paid his way through by taking out loans," he said in an email to Newsmax. At the time, Harvard cost around $25,000 a year, or $75,000 for the three years that Obama attended. And as president of the Harvard Law Review, he received no stipend from the school, Harvard spokesman Mike Armini said."That is considered a volunteer position," Armini said. "There is no salary or grant associated with it."So if the figures cited by the Obama campaign for the Senator's student loans are accurate, that means that Obama came up with more than $32,000 over three years from sources other than loans to pay for tuition, room and board.
   Where did he find the money? Did it come from friends of Khalid Al Mansour? And why would a radical Muslim activist with ties to the Saudi royal family be raising money for Barack Obama? That's the question the Obama campaign still won't answer. Michelle Obama speaking at a campaign event in Haverford, Pa, in April of this year, Michelle Obama claimed that her husband had "just paid off his loan debt" for his Harvard Law School education. In an appearance in Zanesville, Ohio, in February she bemoaned the fact that many American families were strapped with student loan payments for years after graduation."The only reason we're not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books," she said. The first of those best-sellers netted the couple $1.2 million in royalties in 2005.
   In response to Newsmax questions about the Obama's college loans, a campaign spokesman cited a report in The Chicago Sun claiming that Obama borrowed $42,753 to pay for Harvard Law School, and "tens of thousands" more to pay for undergraduate studies at Columbia.The same report said that Michelle Obama borrowed $40,762 to pay for her years at Harvard Law School.But a Newsmax review of Senator Obama's financial disclosures found no trace of any outstanding college loans, going back to 2000.As a United States Senate candidate, Barack Obama was required to file a financial disclosure form in 2004 detailing his assets, income, consulting contracts, and liabilities.
   Obama listed "zero" under liabilities in 2004 and in all subsequent U.S. Senate financial disclosure forms.Under the Senate ethics rules, he is required to disclose any loan, including credit card debt, of $10,000 or more. The only exception to the reporting requirement is mortgage debt on a principal residence.The Senate reports also directly contradict Michelle Obama's claim that the couple had "only just" paid off their student loans after receiving book royalties paid out in 2005 and 2006 â€" well after her husband had been ensconced in the Senate.Apparently, Michelle Obama misspoke, according to the version provided by the Obama campaign. Campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt now tells Newsmax that the loans Sen. Obama took out to pay for Harvard Law School "were repaid in full while he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate [in 2004], and under the rules, the modest outstanding balance he repaid was not reportable as a liability on his personal financial disclosure reports."The Senator repaid the loans on "the expectation of a significant increase in family income" as a result of the paperback edition of his 1995 book, Dreams of My Father, LaBolt said.Obama acknowledges that sales of the hard cover edition of the book were "underwhelming."
   But in the spring of 2004,when Obama won the Democrat U.S. Senate primary in Illinois, Rachel Klayman, an editor at Crown Publishers in New York, read an article about Obama and became interested in his memoir, only to discover that Crown now owned the rights. She asked Obama to write a new forward, and Crown then decided to re-issue Dreams as a paperback in July 2004, just as Obama made his historic speech to the Democrat National Convention.The paperback eventually sold over one million copies, which under the standard industry royalty for trade paperbacks of 7.5%, earned him $1.2 million. However, Obama didn't report income from the book until 2005, so it's unclear how he was able to repay his student loans in 2004.    Responding to attacks from the Hillary Clinton campaign during the primaries, Obama released seven years of tax returns on March 25 of this year. The returns, dating back to 2000, indicate that the couple paid no interest on their student loans. The interest from such loans would have been deductible on their joint income tax returns.
   For 2000 through 2004, taxpayers declared student loan interest as a deduction on line 24 of federal form 1040. After 2004, the deduction can be taken on Line 33.But the Obamas never declared a dime of interest in student loans on their return, most likely because they simply earned too much money to be able to take the deduction under the IRS rules. Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt had no answer as to why the Obamas' failed to declare the loans, stating the obvious that "because interest on the loans was not deducted, it would not appear on the Obamas' personal return."