Rohrabacher Targets Commerce Secretary : Allegations: Controversial conservative leads attack on Brown over alleged offer of $700,000 payment by Vietnamese businessman.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the Huntington Beach Republican whose controversial attacks on undocumented immigrants and government-funded art have earned him unusual notoriety in his five years in Congress, has found a new target: Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown.

Last week, Rohrabacher became one of the first House Republicans to challenge Brown openly over still unproven allegations that the Commerce secretary had agreed to accept $700,000 from a Vietnamese businessman in exchange for easing trade restrictions on the Southeast Asian nation.

Rohrabacher led the questioning of Brown during the secretary’s appearance before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on which Rohrabacher serves. The California conservative has vowed to press for further hearings on the matter, contending that Brown’s answers were less than credulous. Meanwhile, the Miami office of the FBI reportedly is conducting an investigation.

Rohrabacher, whose Orange County congressional district includes the highest concentration of Vietnamese-Americans in the nation, said in an interview Tuesday that he only wants to get to the bottom of the allegations against Brown.

But the congressman also suggested that he is seeking a measure of political retribution for Democrats’ past attacks on members of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

“During a Republican administration, if an underling had anything like this going on, it would be front page news,” complained Rohrabacher, a former speech writer for Ronald Reagan. “But now, all of a sudden, it seems to disappear when you have a big-name Democrat involved.

“If Ron Brown were a Republican, the major media outlets in the country would have full-time investigative journalists going all over the world trying to track this down.”

U.S. News and World Report first broke the Brown story last August when it published allegations made by Vietnamese-American business consultant Ly Than Binh, who reportedly had tried unsuccessfully to interest other media organizations in the story.

Binh alleges that a former business associate, Nguyen Van Hao, who once served as a trade consultant to the government of Vietnam, told him that Brown had agreed to accept $700,000 from the Vietnamese government to help lift the U.S. trade embargo imposed after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

In August, Brown’s spokesman suggested strongly that the secretary had never met Hao or had any business dealings with him. But last week, saying the initial statement had been in error, Brown’s lawyer said the secretary had met Hao on three occasions, beginning last November, but that no money ever had changed hands. The attorney strongly denied that Brown had done anything improper. Brown has dismissed the allegations as “totally absurd.”

Binh says he has never met Brown. All of the allegations are second-hand. But Rohrabacher said he was impressed when he met Brown’s chief accuser last Friday for a private question and answer session on Capitol Hill.

“The man’s either a liar or a patriot,” Rohrabacher said. “And I don’t think he’s lying.”

During Thursday’s hearing, Rohrabacher went on the attack.

“Mr. Secretary, you are under a cloud of suspicion,” Rohrabacher told Brown. “At stake is your credibility and public confidence in the job you do. . . . I’m afraid that your effectiveness will be limited.”

Brown rejected the assertion, insisting that he demonstrates his effectiveness every day. And he turned aside Rohrabacher’s questions about his failure to acknowledge the meetings with Hao earlier. He also said that he had no part in actions the Clinton Administration has taken to ease some of the trade sanctions imposed on Vietnam.

“I worked in the White House, and I can tell you that makes no sense at all, that the secretary of commerce didn’t have any say in easing the embargo,” Rohrabacher said Tuesday. “I think we’re going to look further into this, to see who at the Department of Commerce was engaged in this, and whether they had spoken to Secretary Brown.”

A spokesman for Brown said Tuesday, “Regardless of Rep. Rohrabacher’s beliefs, here are the facts: A career commerce official represented the department at an inter-agency meeting on the subject, and the secretary had no direct involvement in the issue.”

The Orange County Republican, who made headlines when he urged a ban on federal services for illegal immigrants and called for an end to federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts, vowed to keep the pressure on Brown. He suggested that only a public outcry would force Congress to hold hearings on the matter.