Clinton's Asian superfunds

Insight on the News, March 30, 1998 by Keith Russell

The report on campaign fund-raising abuses is in from the Senate: Democrats `often eviscerated or ignored campaign-finance laws.' Now the Justice Department must follow up on charges.

Yogi Berra should have been there to say it was "deja vu all over again." As reporters fidgeted in their seats and members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee entered the crowded hearing room March 5 to approve the committee's final report on its investigation of campaign-finance abuses, the mood in the chamber harked back to last summer. Once again, the committee's two protagonists, Chairman Fred Thompson of Tennessee and ranking Democratic Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, were sitting side by side, uncomfortably tolerating one another like the bride and groom at a shotgun wedding.

In the hallway outside, just as throughout the hearings, a White House spin doctor lingered among the snaking television cables, ready to perform emergency surgery on the Clinton administration's reputation when details of fund-raising misdeeds inevitably filtered out of the room. However, unlike its sensational beginnings, the investigation Thompson had orchestrated for nearly a year to mixed reviews didn't end in a crescendo, but bowed out like a mortician leaving a wake."We could revisit old wounds and throw stones at one another ... we've got time to do that," Thompson said, but whether from sin, anxiety or mere fatigue, no one dared pick up a rock. Instead, the committee voted 8-7 along party lines to approve the report, knowing that Democrats would issue their own analysis of what it all meant to try to dispute the committee's devastating conclusions concerning allegations of the 1996 fund-raising illegalities and improprieties involving the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, and the Clinton/Gore campaign.

And with that, a $3.5 million investigation characterized by Democrats as "insubstantial" and "deeply flawed" was closed. There was no fanfare or back patting. And Democrats were eager to point out that the most eye-popping charge -- that the Chinese government had a plan to influence the 1996 election cycle -- had yet to be proved. "There is nothing in the classified material or open material that supports that conclusion," Glenn told reporters after the committee's final vote. It was a minority opinion.

As leaked drafts foretold, the committee report concludes Democrats "often eviscerated or ignored campaign-finance laws" in a desperate effort to raise money so President Clinton could "wage a massive political advertising campaign" which rescued the president from the brink of political irrelevance and enabled him to mount a stunningly successful reelection victory over Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole of Kansas. Additionally, the report casts a significant shadow on the White House and DNC for tactics that, before anyone had heard of Monica Lewinsky, were thought by many to be the most serious threat to the Clinton administration's legacy.

Meanwhile, in their 90-plus-page response to the 1,100-page committee report, Democrats sought to refute nearly every conclusion made in the official report. In numerous instances, they attempted to characterize questionable fund-raising efforts -- such as providing major donors access to elected officials at the highest level, the use of soft money to pay for controversial "issue ads" and even the charge that foreign money made its way into federal campaigns -- as a problem for both political parties. Subsequently, rather than blaming the scandals on lawbreakers, alleged or otherwise, the Democratic response placed the onus on a "deeply flawed system of campaign financing."

But while Senate Democrats may have seemed ready to write off the ordeal as a bad memory, developments on the other side of the Capitol and elsewhere in Washington may provide a different outcome. The first clue came from Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which is following up on the Thompson investigation. Burton issued a statement in which he said he agreed wholeheartedly with the findings of the Senate committee that foreign money had made its way into the 1996 elections. "If anything," Burton added, "the report understates the case."

Burton's words came immediately after he and other House Government Reform and Oversight Committee members had been briefed by Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Agency Director Kenneth Minihan on much of the same secret intelligence information that had been given to Thompson's committee at the beginning of its investigation. It was just such secret briefings that had compelled Thompson to make his memorable opening statement that his committee had discovered a plan "hatched by the Chinese government" to pour "illegal contributions" into U.S. campaigns.

From the time they were first made in public last July, the charges of a Chinese plot have been as electrifying as they have been contentious. After Thompson's statement, the question of how to expose proof of the plan caused considerable consternation not only among committee Republicans and Democrats but also federal intelligence officials who fretted about releasing sensitive classified information related to the explosive allegations.