Big Brother and the money tree

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 30, 1996 | by Paul M. Rodreiguez

Enter Terence R. McAuliffe, Clinton's reelection-committee finance chairman and former DNC finance guru when Huang worked there tapping into the vein of big-money Asians. McAuliffe long has been involved in fund-raising activities that targeted Asians, as have his associates over the years. A protege of Tony Coelho, the former California Democratic congressman who resigned under an ethics cloud in LEIN as House majority whip, McAuliffe once was finance chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC. Coelho ran that organization while McAuliffe was there. He was well-known as a master fund-raiser and one of the first in Congress to recognize the benefits of reaching out to the Asian community, a matter readily confirmed by press accounts, and in Honest Graft, a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Brooks Jackson (now with CNN).

McAuliffe, a prodigious fund-raiser himself, was linked in the mid-eighties to Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg, Tunney & Evans, a national legal/lobbying firm with offices in, among other places, Los Angeles and Washington. When Huang was sent by the Riady family to set up financial operations in Little Rock during the mid-eighties, the Lippo executive hired Manatt, Phelps (along with the Rose Laxv Firm in Arkansas) to assist in setting up several concerns - specifically, according to press accounts, the California headquarters of the new, Lippo bank.

Around the same time McAuliffe was working at the DCCC he also started his own Los Angeles law firm, McAuliffe, Kelly A Raffaelli, with a man named Peter Kelly, who worked at Manatt, Phelps, Los Angeles office when that firm was helping Huang set up Lippo. Also at Manatt, Phelps during that time was Michael "Mickey" Kantor, the Clinton administration's U.S. trade representative who succeeded Brown as commerce secretary. Shortly after teaming up with Kelly, McAuliffe set up a Washington office for his new legal/lobbying firm. He also helped open a federally chartered bank at about the same time, bringing in Charles Manatt, the former chairman of the DNC and one of the senior partners in Manatt Phelps, the firm that was hired to legally represent Federal City National Bank and assist, separately, Huang and Riady in work on the Lippo bank.

During the mid-eighties, while Huang was establishing Lippos connections in America, he became quite friendly with Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, whose business associates were instrumental in helping to start a financial institution called the Worthen Bank, in which the Riady family, along with Jackson Stephens, an Arkansas multi-millionaire, had an interest. Huang worked on Worthen matters at the same time he was helping to set up the Lippo bank in California. At a crucial point in the 1992 presidential primaries, Worthen, which is at the center of one of the many investigative leads of Independent Counsel Kenneth W Starr, loaned Clintons political machine an estimated $23 million.

By the mid-to-late eighties, Huang had become well-known within Democratic Party circles as a financial contributor with access to others in the Asian community who would also donate large sums of money. FEC records show, that Huang and other Asians were giving substantial sums to Democrats, including House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Nussouri who in made a bid for the White House. Gephardt's finance chief at that time was McAuliffe who, according to press reports, was instrumental in providing the congressman with loans from the Federal City National Bank. It is not known how many other political campaigns the McAuliffe bank was involved in but it appears to be part of a pattern. (Federal City since has been bought out by another bank.)