Читать книгу 1997 Special Investigation in Connection with 1996 Federal Election Campaigns - United States Senate Committee - Страница 16

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At a fundraising lunch held on April 29, 1996 at the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California, and attended by Vice President Gore, Buddhist monastics illegally funneled $65,000 to the DNC through “straw donors” at the instigation of Hsia, a longtime fundraiser for the Vice President. When press accounts of this donation-laundering appeared, Temple officials altered and destroyed evidence to protect the Temple, Hsia, and the Vice President from embarrassment.

Despite his repeated, albeit inconsistent, denials, it is reasonable to conclude that the Vice President was well aware that the Temple event was for the purpose of raising money. The event was organized by Huang and Hsia, who had longstanding relationships with Vice President Gore that revolved almost entirely around campaign fundraising. More specifically, in the weeks prior to his Temple visit, Vice President Gore was repeatedly reminded that the April 29 luncheon was a fundraiser and was even meticulously informed by Ickes of the DNC’s “projected revenue” for the event. The Vice President received the last of these notifications of the April 29 lunch’s “projected revenue” only 24 hours before he received his briefing notes for the Temple lunch.

The Vice President’s staff also knew that the Temple event was a fundraiser. In March 1996, Deputy Chief of Staff David Strauss had helped arrange a meeting in the White House with the head of the Temple, Master Hsing Yun—a meeting which Strauss believed would “lead to a lot of $.” The White House staff repeatedly referred to the event as a “fundraiser” in internal correspondence, and assigned to it a “ticket price” of “1000–5000 [dollars per] head.”

The Temple fundraiser was merely the most egregious episode in a longstanding pattern of illegal donation-laundering by Hsia and the Hsi Lai Temple that stretched back at least to 1993. In that year, Hsia and Huang apparently collaborated in laundering $50,000 to the DNC from the Hsi Lai Temple and from Lippo Group sources overseas in connection with a meeting between Vice President Gore’s chief of staff and the chairman of China Resources, a company linked in press reports to Chinese intelligence. From 1993 until the general elections of 1996, over $140,000 in Temple money was illegally funneled to Democratic candidates at Hsia’s direction.

This pattern of donation-laundering in 1993–96 derived from a broader relationship between Hsia, Huang, and Vice President Gore that began in 1988 when Hsia, Huang, and Riady organized a trip to Taiwan for then-Senator Gore. Hsia thereafter became a significant fundraiser for the Senator. As early as 1989, her fundraising efforts for him involved both monastics from the Hsi Lai Temple and the illegal “tallying” of contributions through the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (“DSCC”).