Читать книгу 1997 Special Investigation in Connection with 1996 Federal Election Campaigns - United States Senate Committee - Страница 15

Table of Contents

Huang first met President Clinton in the early 1980's through their mutual friend, James Riady, the head of the Lippo Group, an Indonesian industrial conglomerate. By at least 1992, while employed by Lippo Bank in California, Huang began to raise illegal foreign money for the DNC through Lippo owned shell companies; these contributions were reimbursed with funds from Lippo’s headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia. His achievements as a fundraiser, coupled with his and Riady’s close friendship with President Clinton, ultimately propelled Huang to the Commerce Department as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in 1993. Despite its accompanying security clearances and intelligence briefings, however, this job in the government apparently suited neither Huang nor his patron, Riady, as Huang was left with less real influence than he had enjoyed as a DNC fundraiser. By the summer of 1995, therefore, Huang sought to move to the DNC.

Two things are clear about Huang’s obtaining a job as a DNC fundraiser. First, it would not have occurred but for the President’s personal interest and recommendation. Second, it took place even though Huang had already engaged in illegal fundraising from foreign sources while at the Commerce Department, and despite the DNC’s awareness of clear indications that Huang would continue to raise funds illegally as the DNC’s Vice Chairman for Finance.

The story of Huang’s move to the DNC, and the fundraising abuses that followed, began in the summer of 1995, when Lippo lobbyist C. Joseph Giroir began trying to persuade the DNC to hire Huang as a fundraiser specializing in the Asian-American community. On September 13, 1995, Giroir arranged a meeting between Huang, Riady, Fowler, and DNC Finance Director Richard Sullivan, at which they discussed the potential for DNC fundraising among the Asian- American community. Riady—a foreign national then living in Indonesia and therefore in a curious position to be consulted by senior DNC officials about how the Democratic Party could raise money for President Clinton’s re-election—joined Giroir in telling Fowler that Huang would be the ideal person to organize an Asian-American fundraising effort for the DNC.

That same afternoon, Giroir, Riady, and Huang met President Clinton and Presidential aide Bruce Lindsey in the Oval Office. Giroir and Lindsey claimed to remember little about this encounter, but Lindsey admitted that they had discussed Huang’s desire to move to the DNC. After this Oval Office meeting, Lindsey told Ickes about Huang’s interest in becoming a DNC fundraiser. The President himself asked Ickes to interview Huang regarding the move to the DNC. After meeting with Huang to discuss the move, Ickes asked DNC Finance Chairman Marvin Rosen to interview him for the job.

While Fowler’s ambivalence may have caused the DNC to not pursue Huang’s services for most of that fall, Fowler’s position changed very quickly after the President intervened to indicate his personal interest in Huang acquiring a DNC position. At a fundraiser on November 8, the President asked Rosen how Huang’s move was progressing, and told Rosen that Huang had been “highly recommended.” The DNC interviewed Huang five days later, and Fowler hired him that same day.

From the beginning, however, some DNC officials were privately concerned that Huang might illegally raise foreign money for the party. Sullivan, for example, worried that Huang might be another Johnny Chung—an Asian-American donor and friend of Huang’s who had offered in March 1995 to pay the DNC $50,000 if Sullivan would arrange for five of his Chinese business clients to attend a radio address with the President. Because of his misgivings about Huang, Sullivan insisted that Huang be given an extensive special training session on U.S. election law by the DNC’s general counsel, Joe Sandler. As Sullivan told Huang, this training session was designed to ensure that Huang knew laws restricting contributions from foreign nationals. Sandler, however, denied that he was ever asked to provide such training.

However, the DNC never undertook the special “training” sessions for Huang that Sullivan had recommended. Making matters worse, despite its grave concerns about Huang, the DNC agreed to compensate him with an “unprecedented” incentive bonus plan clearly designed to encourage even more aggressive fundraising. The results were all too predictable: Huang immediately began illegally raising foreign money for the Democrats.

Near the end of his tenure at the Commerce Department, Huang developed a relationship with Arief Wiriadinata—a landscape architect in Virginia who knew the Riadys because his father had worked for Lippo in Indonesia, and who, with his wife Soraya, ultimately contributed $450,000 to the DNC. On December 15, 1995, shortly after Huang arrived at the DNC, the President hosted a White House coffee to which Wiriadinata had been invited by Huang. As captured on one of the videotapes the White House belatedly released to the Committee in October 1997, Wiriadinata shook hands with the President and confided to him that “James Riady sent me.”

Huang’s first fundraising event, for Asian-Americans at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington on February 19, 1996, also raised early warning signs that the DNC’s initial concerns about Huang were well placed. By March 1996, the DNC discovered that two donations Huang had raised at this event were illegal contributions from foreign nationals. These checks, both for $12,500, were attributable to two individuals who live in China and run an international trading group based there. Although these donations were returned, DNC officials continued to rely on Huang. As the Committee subsequently discovered, the Hay Adams event raised at least another $25,000 in unlawful donations laundered through third-party “straw donors” from the Hsi Lai Temple outside Los Angeles.

Among the prominent Asian businessmen who attended the Hay-Adams event was Ted Sioeng, a foreign businessman who owns a pro-Beijing Chinese language newspaper in California and has close ties to the Chinese government. Though he sat next to the President at the head table at the Hay-Adams, Sioeng was not then a resident of the United States, could not speak English, and was ineligible to make political donations. Sioeng’s presence at the fundraiser—as well as at the head table at the Hsi Lai Temple fundraiser Huang and Maria Hsia organized for Vice President Gore two months later, and at another Huang event with the President only two weeks after that—was apparently arranged through Huang.

Throughout the remainder of 1996, Huang orchestrated numerous events from which illegal foreign money flowed to the DNC. On April 8, 1996, for example, Huang collected $250,000 from John K. H. Lee, a South Korean businessman who had flown from Seoul to have dinner with the President—in return for a $250,000 donation in the name of a U.S. subsidiary of his South Korean business, formed shortly before the check had been written. Huang arranged this contribution after being told that Lee was merely “thinking” about opening a U.S. subsidiary in California, and knowing that Lee was a foreign national ineligible to contribute in his own name. This $250,000 contribution was funded by a wire transfer from Lee’s South Korean company. The DNC, however, found the donation unobjectionable—at least until the 1996 fundraising scandals first became public, at which point Lee’s was the first contribution returned.

Shortly thereafter, on May 13, 1996, Huang organized another major DNC event in Washington, D.C. Like his others, this affair was heavily attended by foreign nationals; Riady and Sioeng, in fact, each sat beside the President at the head table. During the course of the night, Huang arranged for Yogesh K. Gandhi to meet the President and present him with a bust of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi wanted a business associate to be photographed presenting the award to Clinton, but the White House had rebuffed his earlier attempts to arrange the meeting. In exchange for the May 13 photograph with the President, Gandhi donated $325,000 to the DNC. This money had, in fact, been wired from one of Gandhi’s business associates in Japan.

DNC officials admitted concerns during the 1996 campaign about the number of foreign nationals who attended Huang’s fundraisers. It was not until July 1996, however, after an event attended principally by Asian businessmen and their families, that Rosen finally directed that Huang not manage any further presidential events. Despite this concern, however, the DNC was unwilling to forego Huang’s fundraising: the party deprived Huang of his ability to sell access to President Clinton, but did nothing to check the money he generated.