Foreign Correspondent: Guess Who Else Made A Ton Of $$ Overseas?

The Obama campaign's attacks on Mitt Romney's (hissss) "foreign" bank accounts has inflicted the inevitable collateral damage. Turns out, there's a highly-placed campaign operative who made significant income from foreign sources over the last three years:

I find it strange that the Obama campaign would be making so much of Romney’s income from foreign sources when Obama’s foreign source income appears to be a much bigger percentage of his income over the last few years. Of course, one can’t tell for sure because Mitt Romney has not released his 2009 tax return. 

Yet in the three tax years in which Barack Obama has been President (2009, 2010, and 2011), fully 30.1% of the Obamas’ gross income has come from foreign sources: ($2,711,340 out of a 3-year total gross income of $8,993,449).  In 2009, 26.5% of the Obamas’ gross income came from foreign sources. In 2010 it was a whopping 41.4%, and in 2010 it was 30.2%. 

The salary that we taxpayers pay him as President (just under $1.2 million over the 3 years) accounted for less than 13% of the Obamas’ income, a share dwarfed by their 30% from foreign sources over the same period. 

From 2009 through 2011, the Obamas paid $87,429 in foreign taxes, which they applied toward a credit to reduce their U.S. tax bill.  The amounts I examined are reported on Form 1116, of which there are two filed along with their 1040 when they had both general and passive foreign income. 

Their returns do not disclose which foreign countries are responsible for paying the Obamas the $2.7 million in foreign source income, but the overwhelming bulk of it must come from payments resulting directly or indirectly from book sales.  

Nonetheless, the Obamas did report a total of $3,611 in foreign passive income in 2009 and 2010, a type of income that most often results from investments in foreign countries.  Like some of the foreign investments for which Romney has been pilloried, this Obama passive foreign income might result from the foreign investments of U.S. financial entities in which the Obamas invested.

According to Lindgren, the Obamas don't make clear the source of all of this (hissss) foreign money, but reasonably assumes that it comes from sales of the Obamas' books. Good catch by Lindgren, who blogs over at the Volokh Conspiracy. And another sh*t job by the Romney camp, which is haughtily demanding non-forthcoming apologies, rather than looking to turn this thing around on Obama.