Al Gore, Sleazeball
Al Gore, Sleazeball Al Gore is easy to dislike. There are his idiosyncratic policy fevers, like global warming, which give off the distinct vibration of a man naive beneath his years. There is...
...he charged the calls either to the Clinton-Gore reelection committee or to the vice president's office— which was illegal, though reimbursements have since been made...
...It is enough to point out the obvious: that this switch, now revealed, constitutes a serious legal problem for Al Gore...
...He said he'd charged all the calls to a DNC credit card...
...As early as the preceding December, a draft DNC "major donor event schedule" listed a "200K" vice presidential visit to Los Angeles in April 1996...
...John Huang served as master of ceremonies...
...Testifying before that committee earlier this month, however, David Strauss insisted that the event was a "courtesy visit for this religious leader," one designed, at most, to "lay the groundwork" for future "fund-raising events" that weren't "fund-raisers per se...
...There were not just a "few occasions...
...And, second, because it has always been assumed that it is illegal for fund-raising to take place on government property...
...But a reasonable judgment about Vice President Gore needn't await a final determination about whether he deserves indictment...
...Accepting on faith, without further inquiry, the vice president's contention that he was dunning people for high-dollar soft money only, Reno reviewed the criminal code and announced, to much surprise, that this wasn't illegal...
...Some of what Gore said on March 3 we now know to be false...
...Gore, Huang, and Gore fund-raiser Maria Hsia had talked to the master in 1989, during a trip to Taiwan partially paid for by the party's senatorial campaign committee...
...Beneath the artificial surface of stuffy rectitude, it turns out Al Gore is a garden-variety sleaze...
...The truth was printed on paper that passed across his desk, and everyone around him seemed aware of it...
...His I'm-slowing-this-down-so-you-less-bright-types-can-understand-it manner...
...How involved was Albert Gore...
...Gore's first known money call took place that same day, November 28...
...Any such phony-check scheme is illegal on its face, and this one appears likely to have been a violation of tax rules governing religious institutions...
...That truth was tawdry...
...A few months later came reports that immediately before and after this event, devotees of the temple had been pressed to write campaign contributions to the DNC—and that many of them were subsequently reimbursed out of general temple funds...
...When the fact of Gore's telephone practices was initially made public, in the Washington Post of March 2 this year, most experienced politicos were shocked...
...The law is not exactly friendly to the vice president...
...First, because it has always been the assumed protocol that presidents and vice presidents not dirty themselves so directly by asking for cash...
...And on these accounts, we already know enough to judge...
...The vice president was working from 140 "call sheets" prepared by the DNC...
...There is Gore's career-long habit of super-partisan rhetorical crudity—which goes little noticed, so complete is his disguise as a boring person...
...People like Martin Peretz, owner of The New Republic, for example...
...He said that he was "very proud" of what he'd done...
...Now, Al Gore could have known, and should have known, and may even likely have known what was going on in the Hsi Lai Temple and on his own telephone...
...We will not bore you with an analysis of why, for its own purposes and by an apparently unprecedented interpretation of Federal Election Commission regulations, the Democratic party decided to pull such an accounting switch...
...He said: "Sure...
...Gore never used a DNC credit card...
...It can rest on a determination about his integrity and honor...
...He said, several times and pointedly, that he'd done it on only a "few occasions...
...Most important, at least $120,000 in contributions produced by Gore's telephone calls was deposited in the DNC's small-dollar, "hard-money" bank account, not—as the vice president had suggested, and as his donors had assumed—in the high-dollar, "soft-money" account...
...Shortly thereafter, the event was firmed up...
...Many legal analysts—including some in the Clinton-Gore administration and the DNC— have concluded that any kind of fund-raising on government property, by anyone, is prohibited...
...Kelly, Peretz is now quoted as saying, was a closed-minded "wacko" on the subject of White House scandal...
...Peretz cannot square his personal experience of Gore with the fund-raising controversy that now embroils the vice president...
...But Gore's famous line about "no controlling legal authority" isn't entirely ridiculous, either...
...And he said, indelibly, that there was "no controlling legal authority" to prevent him from putting the touch on private citizens while sitting in the White House...
...Gore held an impromptu press conference March 3 to allay these fears...
...Which, of course, is what Al Gore now appears to have done...
...On April 29, 1996, the vice president gave a speech sponsored by the Democratic National Committee at the Hsi Lai Temple in Los Angeles, an outpost of the international Fo Kwang Shan movement...
...In Harold Ickes's voluminous files, there is a memorandum from the DNC dated November 20, 1995...
...To keep the party's national television campaign on the air, the DNC was asking for high-level support, including "10 calls by VPOTUS," an insider's acronym for the vice president...
...And when it was partially revealed, Al Gore slipped and slid around it in a months-long damage-control evasion that should make his buddy Bill right proud—though Bill still does it better...
...Over here at The Weekly Standard, we pride ourselves on being open-minded and not too wacko...
...By the end of the day, e-mail messages back and forth between Gore and his scheduling assistant confirmed that the Los Angeles fund-raising trip was set...
...For when attorney general Janet Reno, back in the spring, first rebuffed Republican demands that she request the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Gore's White House fund-raising antics, she based her decision on one thing above all others...
...A memo from John Huang dated April 11 clearly identifies Hsi Lai as the site of the forthcoming fund-raiser...
...To get the whole, ugly story on the record, the country probably does need an independent counsel investigation: This White House only ever comes close to clean under oath, under penalty of perjury and possible jail...
...Clinton, Gore, and top White House staff appear to have convened a meeting about this request on November 21...
...And to actually convict Al Gore, a prosecutor would have to establish that the vice president knowingly and willingly committed a crime...
...Two days later, on the afternoon of March 15, Hsing, Huang, Hsia, and Gore assembled in the vice president's office...
...She has until October 3 to decide whether to proceed with a formal "preliminary investigation...
...So we will table our prejudices about Al Gore for a moment and simply consider the facts at hand, as they may be pieced together from nearly a year's worth of accumulated revelations...
...After all, there are longtime friends of Al Gore who admire the man a lot...
...The relevant criminal statute has never been prosecuted...
...In a deposition by Fred Thompson's Senate committee this past summer, former DNC finance director Richard Sullivan was asked whether, in April 1996, he had expected actual campaign contributions to be generated by Gore's Hsi Lai Temple appearance...
...And, of course, there is Gore's superciliousness...
...The law, as written, apparently allows you to sit in the White House and call someone up for a soft-money contribution of $100,000 or more...
...It is only against the law, as written, to ask for the smaller, hard-money contributions that the FEC strictly regulates for use in specific campaigns...
...He reached at least 46 wealthy donors and left messages for at least 10 others...
...We turn now to the question of Al Gore's fund-raising phone calls from the White House...
...Embarrassed to learn of this from the Washington Post and not from her own "crack" investigators, Reno is taking a second look at the independent counsel statute...
...One week later, Ickes reminded the president and vice president in writing that unless they worked the phones, the DNC would be pushed into debt by the end of the year...
...DNC chairman Don Fowler was on hand, too...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Notes taken on March 13 by Gore deputy chief of staff David Strauss indicate that DNC fund-raising operative John Huang wanted the vice president to have a meeting with Fo Kwang Shan's "venerable master," Hsing Yun...
...He therefore concludes that the whole matter must be exaggerated, and he has just fired his editor—the estimable Michael Kelly—for making The New Republic a party to the exaggeration...
...DNC officials have since insisted that the only real fund-raiser ever contemplated for April 29 was a Chinese luncheon at the Harbor Village restaurant in Monterey Park, that the luncheon fell apart just days before it was to take place, and that Gore was simply keeping a separate commitment to do "community outreach" at the Hsi Lai Temple...
...What is an open-minded, non-wacko observer to make of all this...
...He dialed at least 86 numbers...
...If the vice president were to meet Hsing again, Strauss's notes have Huang suggesting, it would lead to "lots of money...
...Gore knew Hsing already...
...By February 1996, in regular memos to Clinton and Gore from White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, the target amount had risen to $250,000...
...But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
...But Harbor Village's managers have told the FBI that no record of any planned luncheon exists...
...The day of Gore's temple speech, on site, the vice president's traveling press secretary told reporters the event was a fund-raiser...
Vol. 3 • September 1997 • No. 2
