Hillary Donors Gave Obama $1.8 Million in June

By Sarah Cohen and Matthew Mosk
Sen. Barack Obama has posted his first campaign report since the end of the contentious Democratic primary battle, and political reporters and bloggers are already trying to ferret out whether donors to Sen. Hillary Clinton have been helping her formal rival, now the party's presumptive nominee.

The Post has now conducted its own analysis of how Clinton supporters directed their money in June. More than 2,200 Clinton donors became first-time Obama donors, giving him $1.8 million of the $52 million he raised last month. Of those, 355 contributed at least $2,000, for a total of $1 million.

This number paints a somewhat different picture than the one presented in a Huffington Post report this afternoon, which reviewed the giving by 311 "HillRaisers" who had bundled more than $100,000 in contributions for Clinton. The Huffington Post found only eight HillRaisers on Obama's June finance report. "Not all of those donors maxed out, either, making for a relatively paltry figure of $19,250 in direct, hard-money contributions from HillRaisers for the month," the Huffington Post reported.

Aides to both Clinton and Obama said in interviews that the reason the Huffington Post story found so few names was that it only counted the amount of money donated by bundlers, not raised by them, and many bundlers raise significant amounts of money without ever writing their own checks.