Legality of Noncitizens’ Voter Gifts Questioned

Raising questions about the legality of an immigrant couple’s $320,000 in donations to the Democratic Party, federal election officials said Thursday that it is unclear whether noncitizens legally can make contributions when they do not live in this country.

The uncertainty presents the Democrats with a troublesome new issue. The party already has returned one large illegal contribution from a foreign corporation and has come under attack for other donations tied to foreign interests.

And in another embarrassing development, the Democratic National Committee, which handled the contributions, acknowledged that it has identified another illegal donation of $10,000 in its accounts from a South Korean electronics executive. Committee officials said that the money is being returned. The executive, John K. H. Lee, is chairman of Cheong Am America Inc., which made the $250,000 contribution the DNC refunded last month.

White House Chief of Staff Leon A. Panetta said in Los Angeles on Thursday that White House officials were concerned about the apparent problems in Democratic fund-raising, particularly involving Asian donors and had asked the DNC to explain what had gone wrong.

“We’re asking,” he said. “We’re reviewing contributions.” The new legal questions center on $320,000 of a total of $450,000 given to the Democrats in the last year by Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata, Indonesian nationals who hold immigration green cards making them legal U.S. residents. The well-connected couple began giving while living in suburban Washington, where Arief Wiriadinata was a landscape architect, but continued to contribute for months after they moved back to Indonesia.

Critics have challenged the huge donations as a possible sign of undue foreign influence on the U.S. political process. But this week the legality of the contributions also was questioned after The Times reported that most of the money had been sent from Indonesia rather than the United States.

The issue has further fueled a growing controversy over the integrity of the Democratic Party’s campaign financing effort in a year when both parties are raising record sums after making unfulfilled vows to take tough action to reform campaign finance laws.

Federal Election Commission officials declined to comment on the specifics of the Wiriadinata case, saying that they would not deal with it unless a formal complaint is filed. However, they said, it is uncertain whether such overseas donations are permissible for noncitizens.

Immigrants holding green cards are permitted to donate to U.S. campaigns, according to the legal standard employed by the FEC for 22 years. The DNC has maintained that the Wiriadinatas’ contributions are legal and proper.

But Republicans challenged that interpretation of the law this week in connection with the Wiriadinatas’ contributions. FEC lawyers then examined the law and found that the issue of donations by noncitizens with green cards who have left the United States has never been considered by the commission, FEC spokesman Ian Stirton said.

“This has not been looked at before,” Stirton said. “It’s ambiguous.”

He said that the deliberation process on a formal complaint would take many months, stretching well beyond the Nov. 5 election.

Eager to exploit the issue, Republicans maintained that such a process is unnecessary. One lawmaker declared this week that the contributions are clearly illegal and called on President Clinton to direct the Democrats to return them.

“Mr. President, money contributed by noncitizens when they are not on American soil is just plain illegal,” said Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which handles election law issues.

“This money must be immediately returned and an investigation launched to determine who is responsible for this blatant use of illegal, foreign contributions to pollute our American elections process.”

The challenge focuses on a federal election law that prohibits a “foreign national” from making election contributions. The law defines a foreign national as a noncitizen who is living outside the United States “or an individual who is not a citizen of the United States and who is not lawfully admitted for permanent residence.”

In a memorandum prepared at Thomas’ request, attorneys at the Washington law firm of Baker & Hostetler maintained that the “or” indicates “that if an individual falls within the scope of either clause . . . that person is a ‘foreign national’ for purposes of the act and is therefore prohibited from making political contributions.”

Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman who was appointed to the bipartisan commission by President Bush, said that argument “has some validity under the law,” particularly since Congress intended in 1974 to allow noncitizens who were permanent residents to contribute because “they were considered immigrants who had moved here, established residency here, were working here and otherwise integrating themselves into the community.”

He said “those purposes are arguably not met by somebody who gets a green card and then goes home to another country and starts making political contributions.”

But even if the FEC were to reach this conclusion, he said, he is skeptical about whether anyone could be prosecuted for past actions since the commission has long regarded possession of a green card as the sole legal test in such cases. The DNC said that it follows that standard.

The Wiriadinatas began making their contributions in November after Clinton sent a note of concern to Soraya Wiriadinatas’ father, Hashim Ning, a wealthy Indonesian businessman who suffered a heart attack while visiting the U.S. last spring. Ning, a partner of Indonesian billionaire Mochtar Riady, whose family has close ties to Clinton, died in Indonesia in December, prompting the Wiriadinatas to return to their homeland.

The couple subsequently made 16 additional contributions to the Democrats, most recently a $25,000 check from Soraya in July that brought the total to $450,000. This contribution, like all its predecessors, was reported as coming from one of two Virginia addresses that were no longer occupied by the Wiriadinatas.

In Lee’s case, the DNC initially had failed to identify his $10,000 contribution for the party’s gala convention event on the night that Clinton was nominated for a second term in Chicago because the businessman used his middle names rather than his first name, said DNC spokeswoman Amy Weiss Tobe. The check was identified Wednesday and immediately returned, she added.

Lee, whose company and location have proved elusive in recent weeks, is not a legal resident. The $250,000 Cheong Am America donation was against the law because it came from the firm’s parent company in Korea rather than from revenues in the United States.