The Asian Money Scandal: A Primer
The Asian Money scandal: a primer Tell us quick, President Clinton's defenders demand. Before you begin screaming about the "Asian money" fund-raising scandal dogging the Democratic party and its...
...But it was not until June 26 that the Trust finally decided it could not accept the original Trie boodle...
...2) Charlie Trie and Suma Ching Hai Several hundred followers of Hue Thi Thanh Wallenstatter must also think it's a great country...
...So it returned the money—to him...
...Now, most of the monks and nuns of Los Angeles's Hsi Lai Buddhist temple have not yet had "their" political donations refunded, but that can only be a matter of time...
...The president sent Ron Brown and U.S...
...What sinister conspiracy is involved...
...The money was probably not really theirs...
...He organized the Hsi Lai temple event...
...No doubt the incoming Republican 105th Congress would like to avoid the public reputation for partisan nastiness that so besieged the 104th...
...They, too, appear to be wealthier for having had their names attached to someone else's financial contributions to Bill Clinton...
...Huang began his career at a Lippo-owned Hong Kong bank now half-owned by Communist China's trade ministry (and suspected of Beijing-directed commercial intelligence-gathering activity...
...This nun is currently represented by attorney Peter Kelly, former head of the California Democratic party, and she has changed her story...
...They were probably fronts...
...And he is a very lucky man...
...Gandhi was a "pauper," according to papers filed in his divorce proceeding...
...It is illegal to kite checks and engineer postal-service money orders under bogus names...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Before you begin screaming about the "Asian money" fund-raising scandal dogging the Democratic party and its White House, tell us "what it all means...
...One such friendship was with Dr...
...Investigators hired by Cardozo had by then concluded that Trie's 409 "donors," many or most of them followers of Suma Ching Hai, did not have sufficient financial resources to make such contributions...
...Master preaches something called the "Quan Yin Method," which involves "contemplation of the sound vibration...
...Kelly somehow tells this tale with a straight face...
...Beginning the new Congress with splashy scandal hearings probably doesn't fit into that plan very well at all...
...To understand this allegedly complicated scandal, it helps to focus on just three stories, each of which is actually rather simple...
...In submissions to the Federal Election Commission prepared for her by Kelly, Man Ya Shih now insists that the $5,000 was her money all along...
...And though we would very much like to know, the truth is it really doesn't matter...
...He mysteriously disappeared when reports of his activities first surfaced in the newspapers...
...In 1994, he took a $900,000 severance payment and became a deputy assistant secretary of commerce, in which position he maintained frequent contact with Lippo representatives, his friend Charlie Trie, and senior White House staffers...
...So Cardozo returned it—to them...
...As recently as a few months ago, thirteen years after moving to California from his native India, Gandhi was on the skids...
...Cardozo immediately refused $70,000 as fraudulent or otherwise obviously "deficient...
...It is illegal to disguise the source of U.S...
...So she offered the most innocent explanation she could think of: She told the reporter that she had participated in a felony...
...Following diagnostic examination of the shape of their navels, he has managed to cure people of cancer...
...Her Wall Street Journal admission was a white lie...
...Begin with Yogesh Gandhi...
...But in his friendships, Gandhi was rich...
...Huang later became a U.S...
...They urged caution, which seems to have prompted Cardozo to decline a subsequent offering of $179,000 from Trie...
...Hogen Fukunaga, the multimillionaire leader of a Japanese religious sect known as Ho no Hana Sanpogyo...
...We do not know yet...
...At a May fund-raising dinner in Washington's Sheraton Carlton Hotel, Fukunaga and Gandhi awarded Bill Clinton the 1996 "Mahatma Gandhi World Peace Award...
...While working in Germany for the Red Cross, Hue Thi Thanh was married to a "scientist" (Herr Wallenstatter, presumably...
...Apart from vegetarianism, Master seems to make minimal demands on Her initiates...
...Quid pro quo...
...The two friends were present to confer this prize because Gandhi had purchased tickets to the dinner with a mammoth $325,000 personal contribution to the Democratic National Committee...
...On March 21, 1996, Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, a frequent White House visitor and trade-commission appointee—he chummily calls the president "Lao Ke," or "Old Clinton"—arrived at the offices of Michael Cardozo, executive director of the Presidential Legal Expense Trust...
...Trie was carrying $460,000 in contributions—checks and money orders from ostensibly different sources but with sequential serial numbers and identical handwriting...
...Wallenstatter is a Vietnamese-born woman whose murky biography includes residence in a number of countries around the world, India and the United States among them...
...And it is astounding that the Democratic party, in the face of voluminous prima facie evidence of such criminal behavior, continues to reveal its relevant knowledge in misleadingly tiny dribbles—and that the Clinton Justice Department is only now issuing subpoenas in the matter and has yet to call a single witness before a federal grand jury...
...The president banned mining of a giant clean-coal reserve in Utah, which—an envelope-pushing report by Paul Weyrich's NET recently pointed out—makes Indonesia's own reserves of environmentally friendly coal suddenly much more valuable on the world market...
...But that poor fellow was constraining her spiritual development, so they agreed to a separation, and Hue Thi Thanh wound up in Taiwan, where she now prefers to be known as "Suma Ching Hai," or "Master," or, simply, "She...
...It is illegal, under the tax code, for a house of worship to host a political fund-raiser...
...But if the administration continues to evade Lippogate scrutiny, it will be Congress's duty to hold those hearings just the same...
...By implication, therefore, they involve the billionaire Riady family, owners of Indonesia's Lippo conglomerate and (several of them) friends of the president...
...3) Man Ya Shih and the Hsi Lai temple...
...It is illegal for a foreign citizen to make U.S...
...No one need prove a "quo" to justify pursuit of this scandal, because the "quids" are all so patently illegal...
...Don't be...
...a Democratic activist who did not want to be identified had paid her $5,000 cash in small bills to write the check...
...Back to our original question: What does it all mean...
...A few weeks later, the DNC grudgingly determined that its $325,000 had probably never truly belonged to Gandhi...
...The president sent a get-well note to one of Lippo's founding investors...
...Even more amazing, he has managed to get his picture taken with the president of the United States...
...And unless you can identify it, they suggest, you should please shut up...
...And there things stood until October, when the Los Angeles Times first reported Gandhi's pauperhood...
...She was nervous and wanted to get the Journal's reporter off the phone, you see...
...campaign contributions...
...He was born "Yogesh Kothari," but claims to be Mohandas K. Gandhi's brother's great-grandson...
...Two weeks later, Cardozo met with Hillary Clinton and deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes at the White House to brief them on Trie's unusual gift...
...1) Yogesh Gandhi and Hogen Fukunaga...
...Stumped...
...What precisely was the quid pro quo...
...One of the nuns, Man Ya Shih, later told the Wall Street Journal that her own $5,000 check was laundered money...
...He solicited Yogesh Gandhi's contribution...
...Fukunaga has magical powers...
...Someone's got to uphold the law...
...According to Her World Wide Web home page, "You will not be asked to join any organization, or participate in any way that does not suit your current life style...
...Is this a great country, or what...
...And throughout Huang's tenure in Washington, the Clinton administration did things that made Lip-po people happy...
...A hundred-odd monks and nuns, who take vows of poverty and live on stipends of $40 a month, somehow managed to donate a total of $140,000...
...But he had the remaining $390,000 deposited in a downtown Washington bank...
...citizen working for Lippo in Little Rock...
...But you may want to drink Master's dirty bath water, which is believed to have special curative properties—and you may want to make a $1,000 donation to the Presidential Legal Expense Trust established to help Bill and Hillary Clinton pay attorneys' fees associated with the Whitewater and Paula Jones matters...
...Well, all of these questionable transactions, and several questionable others, directly or indirectly involve John Huang, the now-infamous Commerce Department staffer and DNC fund-raiser...
...Back in April, with party chairman Don Fowler in the audience and Vice President Al Gore in front of the microphone, the temple was host to a DNC fundraiser...
...For most of 1996, after leaving the Commerce Department, John Huang raised soft-money donations for the DNC...
...businessmen on overseas trade missions to ink deals with Lippo subsidiaries...
...campaign contributions...
...He had no assets and no bank account, bill collectors and unpaid former employees were chasing him, he owed back taxes to the state, and he'd lost his driver's license for ignoring a series of traffic fines...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 16
