Unswayed by Donations, Clinton Says

President Clinton expressed support for embattled Democratic fund-raiser John Huang on Friday, saying that he had the kind of business experience and international contacts that “we would be looking for” in senior Commerce Department positions.

The president also said at a White House press conference that, though he had a long-standing relationship with Indonesian business executive James Riady, he had “absolutely not” shaded administration policy toward Indonesia as a result of it.

“I can tell you categorically that there was no influence” on administration policy from the hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from donors associated with the Riady family’s Lippo Group banking and commercial conglomerate, the president said.

Clinton, in his first extended remarks on the burgeoning political money controversy, acknowledged that Huang and other Democratic officials had solicited improper political contributions, while at the same time trying to distance his White House from them.

The president repeatedly attempted to assign responsibility for campaign fund-raising irregularities to officials of the Democratic National Committee--not the White House or the Clinton-Gore reelection committee.

Under questioning, however, Clinton conceded that he is the “titular head of the Democratic Party” and that much of the money raised by the party was used to promote his reelection. But he attempted several times to keep the party’s misdeeds at arm’s length.

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“I’m not trying to disclaim responsibility, but I am trying to point out that there is a difference between what the party does and what the campaign does,” Clinton said.

Clinton appointed the co-chairmen of the Democratic Party, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Don Fowler, and they report directly to him. During the campaign, Clinton also oversaw a weekly “money meeting” that brought together party, reelection committee and senior White House aides to discuss the status of party finances.

Clinton said at the East Room press conference that Republicans were equally guilty of fund-raising excesses.

“The Republicans have their own problems here,” Clinton said. “If they raised money from a million people over two years, it would not surprise me if 10 to 20 of these contributions” were illegal.

Clinton said he first met Huang in the 1980s in Taiwan when he was governor of Arkansas and was on a trade mission to Taipei.

Huang, a Taiwanese American, worked for the Lippo Group in Asia and the United States from 1985 to 1994, when Clinton appointed him to a Commerce Department job with responsibility for U.S.-Asian trade matters.

Huang left Commerce in December 1995 to become a full-time fund-raiser at the Democratic National Committee, where he generated an estimated $4 million to $5 million in donations, chiefly from Asian Americans.

The president said that he met Riady, son of Mochtar Riady, founder of the $12-billion Lippo Group and one of Indonesia’s wealthiest men, when the younger Riady moved to Arkansas in the 1980s to supervise his family’s investment in a Little Rock bank.

“So I had a personal relationship with them [Huang and Riady] that went back several years,” Clinton said.

Lippo paid Huang an $879,000 severance bonus when he left the company to join the U.S. government.

Clinton defended his decision to appoint Huang to the sensitive Commerce post, where he received numerous classified briefings on U.S. policy in Asia.

“And so, assuming that all the proper disclosures were made and all the proper clearances were had . . . I would think that that’s the sort of person we would be looking for, someone who did have good contacts and could and did have a general understanding of international commerce,” the president said.

Asian human-rights advocates have charged that the administration backed off a review of Indonesian trade preferences that had been started to protest its government’s ill-treatment of labor unions.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno is considering whether to appoint an independent counsel to investigate admitted and suspected Democratic violations of federal campaign finance guidelines. Clinton said that he would have no comment on whether the allegations merit a special inquiry.

Clinton repeated his call for comprehensive reform of the system of political fund-raising and called on Republicans to join in a bipartisan effort.

The president noted that the two major parties raised more than $600 million to finance the 1995-96 campaign season.

“If you raise this kind of money, questions will be raised about it,” Clinton said. “And the only way to ever put this to rest is to pass campaign finance reform.”