The Once and Future Scandal
Adams, James Ring
his is the scenario for a by d pireOperans i disaster, World ally, ally On, Only say Superpower. erNpowerorth Af. This Africa, cohfari the World's campaign funding heartions Committee report...
...Every Wednesday afternoon from March 1995 on, Fowler and his senior financial people trekked to the White House for meetings chaired by Ickes...
...Never shy about his importance, Morris demanded weekly access to President Clinton...
...The system that former U.S...
...He remains free in Little Rock, often eating unnoticed in a local Chinese restaurant, awaiting a trial in October that will show how seriously the Justice Department will pursue the 1996 abuses...
...But he never landed a major deal and ate up company profits in taking delegations of Arkansas notables on first-class junkets to China...
...Charlie Trie, 49, is a native of Taiwan who moved to Little Rock in the early 1970's to join his older sister, Dailin Outlaw, in the restaurant business...
...CLINTON'S COMEBACK According to the report, the scandal started with the devastating Democratic losses in the 1994 mid-term elections...
...This account carried a balance of less than $3,000 up until February 12, when it received a wire transfer of $518,433.56 from an account maintained at the Hong Kong branch of the Dutch ING Bank by a company called Pristine Investments, Ltd...
...Two weeks later, at a May 13 dinner at the Sheraton Carlton in Washington, D. C., Sioeng sat at the head table with President Clinton...
...Wu from the Mandarin pronunciation of his surname's ideogram) keeps a very low profile...
...William Proxmire once called "legalized bribery" is now a fact of Washington life...
...And they could play on plenty of guilty Republican consciences...
...The Thompson committee had no power to subpoena overseas bank records...
...Just six weeks earlier, on February 6, he ushered the Chinese arms dealer Wang Jun to a presidential coffee at the White House...
...Tensions between Fowler and Ickes erupted in open arguments over the "state splits," the allocation of funds to the state parties...
...During the next two years, Ng wired more than $1.1 million to accounts controlled by Trie...
...But even this limited material shows that something strange was going on...
...At the time, however, her account held less than $io,000...
...In 1992, the DNC set up an admirable set of controls, modeled on Michael Dukakis's good government instincts...
...The Thompson report calls him "a microcosm of the Committee's investigation...
...The Committee raises the question but can't answer it...
...The Lippo veteran went on the DNC staff five days later...
...It certainly seems that Huang was imposed on the DNC from above...
...In his first meeting with the fund's executive director Michael Cardozo, on March 21, 1996, he dumped the contents of a manila envelope on a table, spilling out "a mound of checks and money orders" totaling $460,000...
...The Thompson committee could never learn precisely how the vetting ended, and its frustration shows up in the final report...
...The collapse of the free republic came centuries before the collapse of the empire and was far more tragic...
...The son of Lippo founder Mochtar Riady, James had spent part of the 1980's in Little Rock as co-president of Worthen Bank...
...The famous fundraising scandals during the '96 campaign started with Huang's Lippo contacts...
...The setting was tailor-made for that well practiced Clinton administration tactic, the stall...
...The Democratic National Committee was no better...
...The existence of a Chinese-government intelligence operation whose agents use the cover of fundraisers to roam freely about the corridors of federal power is, according to both the FBI and Senate investigators, a possibility...
...Plan B itself, suggests the Thompson report, might even constitute a "conspiracy to defraud the government," a serious federal felony...
...In March 1996, Trie approached a second outlet for his fundraising, the Presidential Legal Expense Trust set up to defray the Clintons' legal bills...
...Thompson now had only nine and a half months to assemble his staff, hold hearings, and collect evidence...
...In February 1996, Sioeng switched his allegiance to Clinton...
...To the extent they succeed, even in small things, they will breed contempt for American government and somewhere down the road national security will suffer...
...Jessica Elnitiarta wrote a $100,000 check of the same date on her account at the family-owned Grand National Bank...
...It is highly possible for China to launch real war based on its past behavior in Sino-Vietnam war and Then Bao Tao war with Russia," Trie wrote...
...At this point the trail petered out...
...The committee report speculates that Middleton may have thought Trie's contribution would fall under less intense scrutiny at the defense fund than at the DNC...
...The committee focused on five contributors whose paths crossed with some frequency: John Huang, his employers James and Mochtar Riady, the fundraiser Maria Hsia, and a shadowy businessman named Ted Sioeng...
...And you know what...
...Yet one of these five, Senator John Glenn, showed no embarrassment in playing chief defender of the White House in the Thompson committee hearings...
...The Democratic strategy was to broaden the hearings to cover Republican embarrassments, which were not lacking, and then to push a "reform" bill that continued the old hypocrisy...
...The Thompson report estimates that from 1992 through 1995 Trie earned about $30,000 a year...
...For the next hour and a half, people asked if the party could raise the $10 million budget for the first phase of the plan...
...These strategy meetings began by March 2,1995...
...Outlaw is still well known in Little Rock for her Fu Lin restaurant near the state capitol...
...Although she kept the papers away from the committee, she decided not to shred them and instead hid them under a bed in his Little Rock home...
...This Oval Office meeting has already raised eyebrows,' but the fact it followed so closely on the unveiling of the "soft money" plan raises a serious question...
...2 OPENING I HE GATES With the collapse of large-donor screening and the constant pressure from Ickes to finance Plan B, the DNC fell open to unending scandal, especially with the arrival of John Huang...
...In a subsequent thank you note, Clinton wrote that he "enjoyed having the chance to talk...
...The press wrote off Clinton as "irrelevant" and speculated on primary challengers...
...The Thompson report also noted briefly that Trie himself had apparently obstructed its inquiries, but the fuller story came out only at the end of February...
...Bill Clinton clearly drove these abuses to new extremes in salvaging his re-election...
...The letter received unusually serious attention...
...The American Spectator had just published a cover story on "The Secret Indonesia–White House Pipeline," with the first mention of Huang's role as Lippo's man in Commerce.at the DNC...
...The Clinton-Gore campaign kept federal matching funds but slipped the noose of the spending limits that went with this post-Watergate "reform...
...These illegal straw man transactions figure largely in the 15-count indictment facing Trie...
...The report accuses both the White House and the DNC of "a shared strategy based on the Senate's decision to impose a deadline on the investigation: they would produce information slowly, make any conceivable objection to its production, and then produce only a portion of it after requiring great exertion by the Committee in an effort to delay the inquiry until it ran out of time...
...44 May 1998 • The American Spectator posed to listen in by phone but couldn't be reached...
...Trie also committed to raise large amounts for the DNC from third parties, and the committee concluded he merely used them to launder further transfers from Ng...
...Marvin Rosen, the Florida lawyer who became DNC finance chairman, could go directly to Ickes for decisions, by-passing Fowler...
...see, most recently, "Webb's Dirty Lingerie," TAS, February 1998...
...The White House kept a heavy hand on the DNC for all matters financial...
...Ultimately, after some dithering, the money was returned...
...His full name is Sioeng San Wong, and the surname is transliterated in the Indonesian style...
...Far more than illicit sex in the Oval Office, they expose a flaw in the political system that no one really knows how to fix...
...Within minutes of dumping his checks on Cardozo's table, Trie walked next door to the Palm Restaurant for lunch...
...Although still deputy chief of staff for the White House, says the report, Ickes "simply seized the reins of financial power The press has focused on this meeting but ignored a possible motive for moving Huang out of the federal government...
...Attempts to buy influence can come from any quarter...
...This money, concluded the committee, came primarily from a mysterious Macau businessman named Ng Lap Seng, whose contacts ranged from the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army to a Macau triad, an organized crime syndicate...
...The White House's production of records was so poor from the earliest stages," complains the Thompson...
...The committee report expressed amazement at this level of NSC activity but couldn't draw a conclusion...
...It can, however, accumulate similar examples, whose full story has been only partially told...
...The relations of Huang and the Riadys and the Lippo Group's extensive interests in China may be somewhat familiar by now...
...It was enough to make some Republican leaders lose their appetite for the cause...
...DNC Deputy Finance Chairman David Mercer introduced Trie to Ernest Green of Lehman Brothers, who heard Trie's pitch for the project...
...An ambitious general overthrows the legitimate government of a Third matic usurper served with the leading generals of the superpower in a Desert reading the House Gfriends in the Imperial capital and Storm style campaign...
...Through three years of investigations, Clinton maintained an unparalleled degree of control over congressional Democrats...
...The American system has always relied less on public virtue than on managing the competition among greedy interests, the self-conscious attempt of Federalist io to correct the flaws of Rome...
...The work of the Thompson committee was flawed and incomplete, but it struggled with a basic danger...
...The Thompson committee could have spent much more time, for instance, on drug money contributions from South America...
...According to WAVES records, he visited there twenty-two times from 1993 to 1996...
...Reporters were fascinated to learn that an Alexandria, Virginia landscaper named Aref Wiriadinata had saved up $450,000 just to give to the DNC...
...The FBI sought a search warrant for them last October, but the results of the raid are still under seal...
...The contributions cemented Trie's access to the White House...
...They then proceeded to the White House for a meeting with Clinton and Bruce Lindsey...
...But both documents describe a Republic in trouble...
...But for all its vaunted stability, even this system is heading for trouble if campaign fund-raising outweighs concerns for national security...
...The committee report embraces Morris's own account of his master plan, an unprecedented campaign of issue ads starting in mid-1995 that portrayed the Gingrich Congress as extreme and positioned Clinton in the political center...
...The DNC General Chairman, Senator Chris Dodd, was supFAR MORE THAN ILLICIT SEX IN THE OVAL OFFICE, THE CAMPAIGN FINANCE SCANDALS EXPOSE N. FLAW IN THE POLITICAL SYSTEM THAT NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO FIX...
...These contributions were all booked in the name of American residents or companies, but Committee staff traced at least $200p00 to overseas accounts...
...The committee report identifies CITIC as "a financial and industrial conglomerate reportedly controlled by the Chinese government" and Polytech as the company that handles most of the PRC's arms exports...
...Ng's nightclub, Fortuna's Palace, featuring "most magical table dancing" and a "working dance stage shower...
...Any check over $1o,000 went through a "vetting desk," where a full-time attorney researched the background of the donor...
...The NPF rated a separate chapter in the Thompson report because of allegations over its default on a loan guaranteed by Hong Kong busi46 M ay 1998 • The American Spectator nessman Ambrous Young...
...A REP..K.1S E OF ANCIENT I-11S I RA NAMELY, THE COR.RUPT1ON THE R&M AN KEP LI K 1 C. 1 LAM:1) FROM 1 HE START Encouraged by the Clinton spin shop, the mainstream press largely dismissed the Thompson committee hearings as a theatrical disappointment...
...As Rome expanded its power, the cost of a political career threw ambitious types and their families into debt for a lifetime, forcing them to sell their services and strangling the tradition of public virtue...
...According to an FBI affidavit in Trie's court file in Little Rock, he instructed his Little Rock office manager, Dia Maria Mapili, to pull files sought by committee subpoenas and destroy them...
...Bill Clinton...
...The strongest evidence comes from highly classified sources and must stay under wraps...
...Over the next seven months, his daughter, his in-laws, and one of his American companies gave a total of $400,000 to the Democratic National Committee...
...One other incident showed the kind of company Trie was keeping...
...Both Morris and Ickes claimed credit for the idea...
...Of all the scandals clogging Washington, the campaign funding outbreaks reveal the deepest rot...
...Revelations about the campaign of bribery arouse popular outrage against the political elite...
...Washington should be chastised by the famous words of Jugurtha, leaving Rome after successfully bribing the Senate: "This is a city put up for sale, and its days are numbered if it finds a buyer...
...The letter warned about U.S...
...The White House, through Ickes, demanded prior approval of all DNC budget decisions...
...Rules Committee Chairman John Warner pushed through the compromise over Fred Thompson's objections...
...The foreign threat hogs attention because more mundane campaign abuses have lost their shock value...
...Lower level employees 2 The report fails to give similar detail about vetting procedures at the Republican National Committee, and when asked by TAS, an RNC spokesman took the misguided position that these details weren't a matter of public concern...
...If there were disagreements, the President of the United States wanted something, you know what...
...THE MACAU CONNECTION The saga of Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie shows how much serious reporting remains to be done on the 1996 fundraising scandals...
...Ng's funds and what he or those behind him hoped to gain...
...it helped that his father-in-law was a business partner of Mochtar Riady...
...Tainted money could come from any continent, except possibly Antarctica...
...The close ties between Clinton, the Riadys, and Little Rock business circles have been extensively covered here...
...Altogether, the DNC was forced to return some $2.8 million in contributions generated from this quarter, and that was by no means the end of the story...
...Did this money come ultimately from the PRC to buy American influence...
...Sometime before the '96 cycle, however, even this screening collapsed...
...She uses the Indonesian name Elnitiarta, her mother's maiden name...
...John Huang asked the White House to send a letter of congratulations to the newlyweds...
...Encouraged to feel he can manipulate the superpower, he defies its interests to the point of open war...
...It's another symptom of decay that its findings have been crowded from view by far more trivial scandals...
...Clinton vetoed that thought...
...The Thompson report dwells on Harold Ickes's role as the president's "designee" for the DNC...
...Vice President Gore and possibly the First Lady sat in as Ickes explained the plan for the DNC to buy advertising to tout the president's program...
...The Presidential Legal Expense Trust ceased business at the end 011997, citing a lack of contributions and an overly restrictive operating charter...
...To paraphrase Montesquieu, if Clinton had been a Proxmire, someone else would have been Clinton...
...The effort tapered off in 1994, with the arrival of Joseph Sandler as general counsel, but the Research Division still ran a Nexis search on donors of more than $23,000...
...In turn, a strategic task of the Thompson report is to explode the argument that everybody does it...
...The History of the Jugurthine War by Gaius Sallustius Cris-pus (Sallust) is necessary and chilling companion reading for the Thompson committee report...
...This Africa, cohfari the World's campaign funding heartions Committee report on Senator Fred ings...
...But this fixation is almost a symptom of decay...
...Yet between 1994 and 1996, he channeled a total of $220,000 to the DNC...
...According to the report, Clinton presented the idea to DNC National Chairman Don Fowler at a Sunday night meeting at the White House on September 10,1995...
...Its revelations were "old news" (partly because of preemptive White House leaks designed to dump the most damaging material into the more manageable news cycle of the weekend press shows...
...The superpower has become so corrupt that it can no longer mount a crushing campaign, and the fighting stalls...
...Around July, a "Plan B" emerged, to pay for the ads through the unlimited "soft money" donated to political committees for "party-building...
...After Fowler delayed in taking him on, President Clinton personally told DNC Finance Chairman Marvin Rosen at a November 8 fundraiser that Huang was "highly recommended...
...But it is hardly cause for complacency...
...The theme of Thompson's report is that foreign interests tried to buy American political influence through campaign JAMES RING ADAMS is an investigative writer for The American Spectator...
...On September 13, C. Joseph Giroir, the American lobbyist for the Indonesian Lippo Group (and former chairman of Little Rock's Rose Law Firm), called on Fowler in the company of John Huang and James Riady...
...Wang Jun's visit stands out, even in a season of scandals, because it fell right in the middle of a Customs Service sting directed against his company...
...Mr...
...But Trie's own deeds showed that he expected some kind of reciprocity when he made a donation...
...Potential witnesses took the cue...
...Wang Jun was chairman of the China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC) and also of Poly Technologies...
...Without the testimony of Trie and Middleton," it said, "the Committee cannot determine whether the letter had any connection to the donations to the Trust and/or, more importantly, whether Trie was acting at someone else's direction...
...One of these is the tale of Charlie Trie...
...The public summary of the China Connection relies on circumstantial evidence, saying in effect we have better stuff but we can't tell you what it is...
...Ng did tell a local paper that the report of his link to organized crime "is absolutely untrue and has no basis in fact...
...Ickes made no apologies for this central control...
...No funding was in place as late as March, and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle was threatening a filibuster...
...The personable Trie became good friends with legislators, cabinet officers, and Gov...
...He worked his DNC contacts to help find financing for a real estate project Ng had planned for Macau...
...After his coup, exiles appeal to the superpower to intervene, but the general makes large campaign gifts to well placed senators...
...Morris suggested the committee turn down the matching funds and go for unlimited spending...
...Curiously, observes the report, arrangements for Wang Jun's visit were handled by Ernest Green of Lehman Brothers, who contributed $50,000 to the DNC on the same date...
...The Customs sting, called Operation Dragon Fire, hoped to trace his contacts up the chain of command of Wang Jun's Poly Group, which had provided them a price list for future shipments...
...Bringing a number of guests, Sioeng personally attended four major fundraisers, including Vice President Al Gore's notorious April 29, 1996 visit to the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California...
...Potential major witnesses stayed out of reach in places like Jakarta and Macau...
...Another daughter is married to a son of the prominent Tanuwidjaja Indonesian business clan...
...Thus was born what the committee report calls a "scheme to evade federal election laws...
...THE REPORT CUED HAVE SPENT MUCH MORE TIME ON DRUG MONEY CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SOLITH AMERICA...
...This statement is true, since committee staff ran into a stone wall when the money trail left American jurisdiction...
...The fund hired Democratic gum shoe Terry Lenzner to vet the checks, but instructed him not to interview Trie...
...Ng first emerged in Trie's company in early 1994, in an unsuccessful bid to buy the Camelot Hotel in downtown Little Rock...
...Another Chinese restaurateur in northern California, bragging to a Customs informant about his connections to the "princelings" of the Peoples Liberation Army, had arranged to smuggle 2,000 AK-47s to San Francisco...
...But from the American records at hand it concluded that this contribution was made "with substantially all foreign funds," making it illegal...
...Blum asked if Charlie Trie's introductions had tipped Wang Jun to the operation...
...Ickes didn't want to use up the $3o million limit on Clinton-Gore primary money imposed by the federal matching funds...
...But at his worst, Clinton did no more than sweep away restraints that were already a tottering hypocrisy...
...Republicans won every high-profile contest and took control of both Houses of Congress for the first time since the early 1950's...
...That's the way it ought to be...
...In fact, it appears that the DNC made a decision to operate under a "system" that would turn a blind eye towards questionable contributions, allowing the DNC to receive large, illegal contributions without any accountability for their receipt in the event that they were detected...
...With no one lending the bipartisan aura that William Cohen or Lowell Weicker gave to the Watergate inquiries, the president's supporters found it easier to cry party politics...
...On March 5, Majority Leader Trent Lott caved and proposed a cut-off at December 31...
...A judicial hearing and appeals would have run to the end of the year, when the documents would have been useless...
...But Ted Sioeng is a relatively new name with highly provocative connections...
...Five U. S. senators were so beholden to Keating that they met as a group with the chief federal thrift regulator to complain about a federal vendetta...
...The most dramatic defiance, however, came from a number of American non-profit organizations, including the AFL-CIO, which simply refused to produce any documents about their role in 1996 fundraising...
...One of his daughters, Jessica, is based in California as a permanent resident alien and looks after his United States interests...
...In October 1995, the Sioengs contracted to buy the International Daily News, a Chinese-language newspaper in Los Angeles...
...The committee report complains that the White House delayed producing the WAVES records for Ng until the afternoon after the completion of testimony on Trie's contributions...
...It sets out to show that the Clinton fundraising in 1996 was a special case—bolder, vaster, and more coordinated than anything tried before...
...The focus wandered, as the Democratic minority popped up distractions...
...But the Thompson report quotes the response of Richard Sullivan, Deputy Finance Chairman of the DNC, to a question from Senator Glenn about the Republican committee: "Unfortunately, Senator, I'm sorry to tell you, but their system was much more systematic, complex and thorough than our system...
...Fundraising underlay the greatest financial disaster of the 1980's, the savings and loan debacle...
...were so uncooperative that committee lawyers decided to leave them to the mercy of the Justice Department...
...But Trie's approach was anything but low-key...
...Officials of Polytech's American subsidiary fled for China two days before they were due to be arrested...
...He returned to Little Rock in February, after the committee report had been drafted, and surrendered to the FBI...
...But according to an article by Howard Blum in the December 1997 Vanity Fair, the sting was aborted by mysterious press leaks...
...One of his main businesses makes and distributes Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes under a special arrangement with the PRC...
...Even more remarkably, Ng gained entry there 47 IT'S PERHAPS UNFAIR_ [HAT SO MANY ASIANS ARE NAMED...
...when she turned it over to brother Charlie in 1984, it continued to flourish as a watering hole for state politicos...
...Sallust writes with a literary compression definitely lacking in the sprawling 2,000 page Senate majority report (and its 1,000 page minority dissent...
...The committee expressed bafflement about "the source of Mr...
...The campaign funding scandals in fact look like a symptom of maturity and decay in the natural life cycle of republican governments...
...Clinton turned to a savior from his past, the amoral, obnoxious, and politically brilliant Richard Morris...
...In 1995, however, his interests contributed $ioo,000 to Matt Fong, Republican candidate for California state treasurer and $5o,000 to the National Policy Forum, a "grass-roots" think tank founded by then–Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour...
...Huang, head of Lippo interests in the U. S., had joined the administration as deputy assistant secretary of commerce...
...The pipeline also extended through figures like Johnny Chung, a "hustler" in the words of a National Security Council memo, and the former Little Rock restaurateur Yah Lin ("Charlie") Trie, a deal-maker who never seemed to make money but always had large amounts to contribute...
...f.14 48 May 1998 • The American Spectator...
...On January 28,1998, the Justice Department indicted him on charges of funneling illegal foreign money to the The American Spectator • May 1998 DNC...
...1 HE PLAN B CONSPIRACY A clue to the fundraising plans came just three days after the Sunday night meeting...
...Was Huang and his Asian money conduit an integral part of Plan B from the beginning...
...Ng (also called Mr...
...A number of people said it was going to take a lot of work and stuff like that," Fowler later told the Thompson committee...
...When his collapse cost taxpayers $z.6 billion, it gave rise to the Keating Five scandal...
...The final report puts these failings into the perspective of a bad decision at the outset...
...But crucial evidence, such as videotapes of Clinton fundraisers and WAVES records of White House visitors, failed to arrive until October or later...
...This strategy was based on a shrewd calculation that the committee had no time to enforce its subpoenas in court...
...The American Spectator • May 1998 money...
...The three told Fowler that Huang wanted to move to the DNC to handle Asian-American fundraising...
...The White House even developed a "special relationship" with the DNC Finance Division...
...This may seem like a flight of fancy based on Panama's General Noriega or even Saddam Hussein in his mid-1980's courtship of the U.S., but this scandal already erupted, 2,000 years ago, in the only other Republic to become the World's Sole Superpower...
...Evidence was only partly digested, thanks to a White House strategy of very slow compliance, and total non-compliance from others...
...Morrison did bring one trophy home, however: an advertising card for Mr...
...As Clinton went national, Trie apparently decided to trade on his guanxi, his personal entree, and set up a trading company called Daihatsu International...
...It concluded: "It is no coincidence The American Spectator • May 1998 45 that vetting was dismantled during a period of historic need for money to pay for unprecedented advertising, resulting in huge amounts of foreign and other illegal money...
...This was about half of the total amount raised by the fund to that date, and alarm bells went off loudly...
...Trial lawyers, tobacco companies, and competing casino interests bid hundreds of thousands in contributions to change laws and regulations without turning a hair among the political class...
...43 STN...
...James Riady reemerged in Jakarta recently, denying to American reporters that his family had any connection to Chinese intelligence services...
...Elnitiarta's resident status...
...The Senate was Rome's and the briber was a dashing figure named Jugurtha, the illegitimate scion of the rulers of Numidia, in North Africa...
...But the report aimed much higher...
...With this level of control, the committee suspected White House involvement in one of the murkier episodes at the DNC, the dismantling of its system for screening large contributors...
...The senators who still show some self-loathing apologize for the extreme cost of an election campaign, but they continue to raise the money...
...Mr...
...The Sioeng family received millions of dollars in similar wire transfers from Hong Kong, using the money for business purposes such as subsidies for the International Daily News...
...After the sale, the paper's editorials switched from pro-Taiwan to "breathlessly pro-Beijing...
...The Thompson report explores the mechanics of the White House operation in fascinating detail...
...See "John Huang's Bamboo Network," TAS, December 1996...
...Committee investigators traveled to Macau and managed to reach him on his cell phone, but he refused to talk...
...But our general tends toward megalomania...
...Follow, for example, the way the family paid for a bloc of seats at a February 19, 1996 Hay-Adams dinner for the Asian Pacific American Leadership Council, the first major DNC event organized by John Huang...
...The committee said it was unable to learn how the two first met...
...At the start Morris and Ickes argued about funding...
...For most of his fifty-some years, according to the Thompson report, Sioeng spent only brief periods in the U.S., dividing his time between Singapore and Hong Kong...
...FRED THOMPSON'S REPORT IS MORE THAN 0:ED NEWS...
...These ads cost millions and required massive fundraising...
...as well as Clinton, they included Vice President Gore, Harold Ickes, Erskine Bowles, and other top figures from the White House, the Clinton-Gore campaign and the Democratic National Committee...
...In spite of committee subpoenas, thirty-five refused any cooperation and another ten, in the words of the report, "fled the country...
...But the Asian connection had a special urgency, coinciding with intelligence reports that the Peoples Republic of China had adopted a plan to buy influence in American politics...
...The report doesn't say it directly, but the White House couldn't have dared this level of obstruction without the tacit support of a large part of Congress...
...He also declined an interview with Wall Street Journal editorial page writer Micah Morrison, another visitor to Macau...
...The President of the United States got his way," he told a Thompson committee lawyer...
...Committee staffers concluded from National Security Council documents that he "almost certainly" dined with Mark Middleton, because minutes after the lunch hour Middleton faxed a letter from Trie to the president...
...Sioeng sat next to Gore at the head table...
...It's unfair in a way that so much of the scandal headlines and the Thompson report featured Asian names...
...The general who eventually crushes the African upstart returns home to lead a violent reaction against the corrupt capital...
...report, that the committee issued a subpoena on July 31 by a unanimous vote...
...Three days later she covered the check with a transfer of $200,000 from an account in her aunt's name...
...In highly visible hearings, they use their arts to discredit his victims and support the new regime...
...From around 1992, the Sioeng family began to make a series of American investments, including stock in the Grand National Bank of Alhambra, California...
...intervention in a crisis between Taiwan and the PRC...
...From the start of the new Congress in January1997, infighting over the budget, the deadline, and even the scope of the hearings came close to aborting the inquiry...
...The committee definitely traced $135,000 of Trie's DNC contributions to these overseas transfers...
...Trie was directed to the defense fund by his friend and former White House aide Mark Middleton...
...Indeed they are and might even be a suitable matter for federal legislation...
...Corrupt thrift operators such as Charles Keating ran wild with government guaranteed deposits, and used political contributions to buy protection from federal regulators...
...The DNC disagreed, noted the committee report, and decided to keep the money because of Ms...
...THE CASH TO BUY IT Although this thought weighed on Thompson committee investigators, the report deals circumspectly with the source and motives behind the influx of foreign money...
...Much of the press is judging it by his success in proving his most sensational charge, that the highly publicized illegal Asian money flowing to the Democratic National Committee in 1996 served a Chinese Communist master plan...
...Trie apparently spent the life of the committee investigation safely tucked away in Macau...
...At the height of the '92 campaign, up to eight staffers worked for the "Major Donor Screening Committee...
...He made many future , overnment learned its politics well...
...The Thompson report clearly shows that a series of White House decisions—the early spending on Plan B, the dismantling of DNC screening, and even Bill Clinton's personal endorsement of John Huang—left American politics unusually vulnerable to foreign money...
...The committee found no wrongdoing in that arrangement or in the $5o,000 donation from Sioeng's Panda Industries...
...It's no consolation to hear committee Democrats argue that the Majority focused unfairly on Asia...
...Except for the Tamraz episode, the best witnesses were missing, pleading the Fifth or fleeing abroad...
...In the absence of any sanctions deterring such behavior, the DNC, run by the White House, consciously disregarded the prospect of illegal contributions...
...For some in the press, the "China Plan" became the touchstone for the hearings, mainly because Chairman Thompson made it the focus of a preliminary statement...
...It also tracked the source of Charlie Trie's money to the lurid Ng Lap Seng, a hotel owner based in the seedy Portuguese enclave of Macau, a hotbed of intrigue, prostitution, and gambling near Hong Kong...
...ten times, a record the administration apparently found embarrassing...
...of these witnesses still in the U.S...
...The NSC prepared a draft response personally reviewed by then–national security adviser Anthony Lake and signed by the president...
...The final report reflects the committee's frustration in proving its case...
...Thompson's staff dropped the case, frustrated "directly and solely" by the Senate deadline...
...In mid-1995, Sioeng also dramatically increased the scale of his political contributions...
...It explicitly questioned the candor of DNC General Counsel Sandler, who still holds his position...
...The Minority report, moreover, devotes considerable energy to debunking Chairman Thompson's initial statements about the China Plan...
...From 1992, he had given up to $10,000 at a time to ethnic Chinese state and local candidates (and his daughter Jessica gave $2,000 to the California Republican Party...
...Such a plan may have existed, admitted the Minority, but the Committee received "insufficient evidence" to show that "any Chinese government money had actually made its way into any federal campaign...
...I I IL SICCING PARADIGM A citizen of Belize in Central America, Sioeng is evidently an ethnic Chinese from Indonesia...
Vol. 31 • May 1998 • No. 5
