Charlie trie and Mr. wu
FERGUSON, ANDREW
The Ballad of Charlie Trie and Mr. Wu The Thompson Hearings Get Interesting By Andrew Ferguson Tuesday, July 29 Jingle, jingle, jingle. I could hear him in the hallway outside the room where the...
...When the hearing was over I rushed out to the hallway, where Lanny stood jingling...
...As the hours wore on he assumed the look of a guy who had just returned from an idyllic vacation to find his house eaten up by termites and his son in bed with the Orkin man...
...Still others point out that the two possibilities are not at all mutually exclusive...
...An essential episode in Trie lore tells of the half-million dollars that he tried to donate last spring to the Presidential Legal Expense Trust...
...We got a fuller, even more colorful picture of him today...
...Yes, the job is an irritant, but he's your president, and when the president asks something of you, etc...
...Again Cardozo demurred, but surely today he must wish he had never heard of Bill Clinton or Charlie Trie—or Father Hesburgh, for that matter...
...That's what you hear when he's around, louder sometimes than the high, reedy voice—jingle, jingle, jingle...
...Chairman Thompson had turned over three days of hearings to the Democrats, who used them to ventilate a sleazy foreign loan executed in 1994 by Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee...
...Trie is not a fugitive from justice," the attorney wrote...
...Wednesday, July 30 Istand corrected...
...But the fact that he was nearly penniless did not inhibit his generosity, in return for which he was invited at least 23 times to the White House, including a visit with other DNC high rollers to the private residence, where he dined with the president...
...But the plot has thickened considerably this week: We started out four weeks ago with John Huang, but now we've got a cult, bags of illicit money, untraceable wire transfers, inflatable toys, private investigators, unaccountable White House visits, a nun in a cocktail dress, Elliott Richardson, and the mysterious Mr...
...When Clinton's fondest hope was realized, Trie followed him to Washington and set himself up as a "consultant...
...When he holds a piece of paper, he rolls it into a tube and twists it, twists it, until it's the circumference of a pencil...
...Lanny Davis, the special White House counsel in charge of damage control, is a tightly wound man...
...Imagine the scene...
...Here you are, a prominent Washington attorney, working without pay, proud to enhance your unblemished record by answering the president's call to service...
...He sounded like Clint Eastwood...
...Wu's money from one account to the next, and then donated it to the DNC...
...Today Lanny returned, and it was not a good day...
...Cardozo has a fine reputation, and like so many decent people who have become entangled with the world of Bill Clinton, he finds himself for the first time in his career at the center of controversy...
...We will stipulate, as we have always stipulated, that there may have been certain people involved in these matters who might have crossed the line," he said, rocking forward...
...What a time for an intermission...
...The FBI agent discovered a series of wire transfers from Asia to Trie's various bank accounts, totaling $1.4 million...
...But he underestimated his president, as so many have done...
...Very disturbing," said Sen...
...Her cultists have been known to drink her bath water "for its curative powers" (no ring around this tub...
...The first witnesses were Terry Lenzner and Loren Berger, private investigators hired by the trust to trace the source of Trie's attempted donation...
...The trust, of course, is a defense fund, set up to help the president pay his many, many legal bills...
...He moves from triumph to triumph...
...An FBI agent testified this morning to lay out the garish particulars...
...I almost felt bad for him...
...Lanny's back...
...They know all about Charlie Trie...
...He is never fully at rest...
...That's for the record...
...Many of their names wound up on the bogus checks and money orders offered to the president's trust...
...At one point, Trie even asked him to help market a line of Chinese-made inflatable toys...
...Even the committee's Democrats were abashed, slightly...
...He has recently been outside of the United States pursuing business opportunities...
...If only he didn't look like Wally Cleaver...
...Much of the session was consumed in digressions...
...The money-laundering scheme, as laid out by the FBI agent, was explicit, detailed, and irrefutable...
...Lenzner and Berger were far more interesting on the subject of Trie's donations...
...Experts note that there has never been a highly distinguished, bipartisan board upon which Father Hesburgh has not sat...
...Nickles drawled, "but I do mind you messin' with my wife...
...Its board of trustees is a bipartisan group of men who have built highly distinguished careers sitting on boards: Elliott Richardson, John Brademas, Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, and perhaps the greatest board-sitter the world has ever known, the Rev...
...To a man, they were shocked—repulsed— sickened by such conduct...
...I don't mind you messin' with me," Sen...
...But look: The American people have already read about Charlie Trie...
...I am an old friend of the president," he says . . . "a close friend" . . . and in that moment you learn more about your president than you ever wanted to know...
...How is this possible...
...For a fee of $17,000, Lenzner offered, among other things, to "conduct searches in appropriate online computer databases of Nickles, his wife Linda L. Morrison and two related companies...
...But what would Lanny say...
...Some have suggested he's in the Chinese mafia, others that he's a stooge for the Chinese government...
...It gets weirder: They're vegetarians...
...The Republicans agreed...
...The man must have splinters...
...Now he spends his hours giving depositions, offering congressional testimony, producing documents, meeting with investigators, answering press queries . . . another public servant whose life has been touched by the Clinton magic...
...over and over again...
...And $905,000 of this came from a single source, a Macao businessman named Ng Lap Seng—known to associates, through some freakish transliteration, as Mr...
...Highly suspicious," said Sen...
...But that's not what Republicans wanted to talk to them about...
...What's new here...
...Let me stress: almost...
...He returned Trie's donation, but went to great lengths to keep it out of the news...
...This is a week devoted to Charlie Trie, the "Little Rock restaurateur," as he has come to be known, who contributed $220,000 to the Democratic National Committee from 1994 to 1996, and raised an additional $400,000 for the lucky donkeys...
...Glenn, looking glum...
...Cardozo remains loyal, however...
...Still, the ultimate source of the funds Charlie gave to the trust remains clouded in mist—like so much else in the committee's work...
...And then suddenly, one snoozy morning, into your office walks this . . . this Creature from the Little Rock Lagoon . . . this shady apparition from your president's unknowable past . . . carrying envelopes stuffed with checks that he dumps out in wads on your conference table...
...Lanny has been a fixture of the Thompson hearings from the first week, jingling and spinning, waiting outside the hearing room to tell reporters during breaks that they've heard all this before, it's old news, why don't you guys give the White House a fair shake, that's all we're asking, a little balance, is that too much to ask...
...Wu is, as his name implies, mysterious...
...For her part, Ching Hai favors sequined cocktail gowns and elaborate headdresses, and is often transported in a gaudy throne borne by her male courtiers...
...The deal was never consummated, but the Newsweek story allowed the senators to launch themselves into flights of moral indignation, from which vantage they looked down in disgust upon this fallen world where people do opposition research on their political adversaries...
...In any case, Trie juggled Mr...
...A more fitting job title would have been "loser...
...But I hadn't seen him at all during the week of July 21...
...they're scheduled to start up again in September...
...Thursday, July 31 Today is the last day of hearings for several weeks...
...Trie befriended Bill Clinton years ago at his Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, when the future president was just a chow-mein-lovin' governor from a place called Hope...
...I could hear him in the hallway outside the room where the Thompson hearings are held, and I knew at once: He was back...
...During his years in Washington he never made more than $30,000...
...Theodore Hesburgh...
...Lenzner was more than happy to oblige...
...Newsweek reported this week that an Oklahoma Indian tribe had met with Lenzner in May and asked him to dig up dirt on their senator, Don Nickles, who is also, perhaps by coincidence, a member of the committee...
...Trie has now fled the country to China, and all of the money has since been returned, because it turns out—brace yourself— that Trie's fund-raising techniques did not conform to certain conventions of Western society, like laws...
...If he doesn't have a piece of paper he digs deep into his pocket and grabs a clump of change, then releases it, Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Durbin of Illinois, shaking his head...
...He delivered the money—checks and sequentially numbered money orders—by hand, in large sacks...
...It turns out that Charlie is a follower of a Vietnamese-born Buddhist nun called Supreme Master Ching Hai, whose globe-girding cult claims 100,000 followers...
...As he speaks, he rocks forward on the balls of his feet, as if he were peering over a hedge...
...When he took the job in 1994, President Clinton was the most despised man in the country, and Cardozo probably reasoned that collecting donations to his legal defense fund would have kept him as busy as the Maytag repairman...
...and to buy her watercolor paintings for as much as $80,000...
...Yesterday I wrote that Charlie Trie had "fled the country," but today I saw a fax from Charlie's Washington attorney...
...His defensive skills hadn't been needed...
...As with all bipartisan boards, the trust's director is a Democrat, Michael Cardozo...
Vol. 2 • August 1997 • No. 47
