Big Brother and the money tree

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

McAuliffe, from his days at the DNC both before and after serving on the president's reelection committee he went back and forth), would have been in a position to keep close watch on Clinton,s coffers and to know whether the DNC was properly overseeing its fund-raising activities, according to Democratic, officials. "In shortly," says one highly placed official, "it would be a stretch to suggest that Terry [McAliffe] didn't know what Huang was doing.... Hell, [McAuliffe] sat in on numerous meetings that coordinated our people in government and at the DNC.... Getting money from the Asians was just one of the many things we kept a watch over."

And what about Huangs activities? "We didn't know all his daily actions but let me tell you that we were well aware of what he was doing because he was very important to us," says a second high-ranking Democrat familiar with operations inside the DNC and at the headquarters of the Clinton reelection campaign. "McAuliffe is not stupid, let me tell you, and he's one of the best in the fund-raising business.... The reason he's so good is that he knows where everybody is," like Huang, "and what they are doing." (McAuliffe has told reporters that he barely knows Huang and has only said hello to him on a couple of occasions.

Besides using the Klayman Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and the Big Brother computer system to hack into the thicket of the growing fund-raising scandal, congressional investigators say they want to know what roles McAuliffe played at the DNC and on the reelection committee and how these might interact with Big Brother. Congressional investigators also want to know whether Kantor, McAuliffe and others on the president's reelection committee and at the White House were familiar with Huang,s activities at the DNC and at Commerce. And they also want to know who maintained the controls on all that "fund-raising" and what appears to be purely political data flowing, into the Big Brother database.

The White House, for its part, insists it has done nothing wrong and that all uses of Big Brother purely are for "official" purposes. Officials there also point out that they have turned over a redacted (censored) version of the entire Big Brother database to congressional investigators. If it was such a big secret," says one White House aide, "then why would we turn over our files?"