Donation Probe Looks Closely at Clinton Friend

For Mark Grobmyer, the 1992 presidential election brought an exhilarating transformation from life as an obscure attorney in Little Rock, Ark., to a new role as a self-appointed shuttle diplomat.

Just two months after his friend and golf buddy, Bill Clinton, entered the White House, Grobmyer, acting as an international business consultant, found himself in a private meeting in Jakarta with Indonesian President Suharto. Accompanying Grobmyer was a friend and business associate, James T. Riady, the son of the founder of the Indonesia-based Lippo Group.

Suharto, who was desperately seeking international prestige, asked Grobmyer to take a message back to President Clinton: Let Suharto address the annual summit of the world’s seven biggest industrial countries, which was scheduled for that summer in Tokyo.

When Grobmyer returned to the United States, he contacted White House Chief of Staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty, whom he knew from Arkansas, and Nancy Soderberg, the staff director of the National Security Council, whom Grobmyer had met during Clinton’s campaign.

Grobmyer and Riady then met privately with Clinton in the Oval Office to discuss their Indonesia trip--and apparently relayed Suharto’s message.

As it happened, Suharto never got to address the economic summit. But he did obtain a private meeting with Clinton during the Tokyo summit, Clinton’s first overseas trip as president.

Now, four years later, Grobmyer is emerging as one of several old Arkansas friends of Clinton’s to be caught up in investigations of possible foreign-influence peddling.

In particular, his contact with Soderberg is casting a shadow all the way to Clinton’s troubled nomination of Anthony Lake to be CIA director. Lake was Soderberg’s boss in Clinton’s first term.

Grobmyer’s apparent willingness to trade on his friendship with the president--as well as his access to senior officials such as McLarty and the NSC’s Soderberg--while building a relationship with Riady and Lippo have raised red flags not only in the Lake nomination but also in the fund-raising controversy surrounding the 1996 election campaign.

Grobmyer reportedly first met Clinton while a student at the University of Arkansas Law School, where Clinton was teaching. Grobmyer is also a long-time supporter and friend of Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper Gore, who grew up with Grobmyer’s wife. Grobmyer is among those who encouraged Clinton to choose Gore as his running mate in 1992.

In Indonesia, Grobmyer acted as a business consultant trying to arrange joint ventures between Lippo and U.S. firms. He quickly drew notice because he carried a business card that identified him as a “liaison to the White House” from the Center for the Study of the Presidency, a think tank with offices in New York that received donations from Riady.

On Feb. 14, the White House released 165 pages of internal e-mail, memos and other documents from the National Security Council in response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request for information about possible connections between Lake, the NSC and the Democratic fund-raising affair.

Included in the documents was a March 24, 1993, letter from Grobmyer to Clinton, in which Grobmyer described his meeting with Suharto. The letter mentioned Suharto’s desire to speak at the economic summit in his role as the elected leader of the nonaligned movement of nations.

“I have talked with Mack McLarty and Nancy Soderberg about this and I will prepare a separate memorandum to you on this issue which I hope we can discuss,” Grobmyer wrote to Clinton. “To summarize, President Suharto would like to address the [summit] to state a new position of the [nonaligned movement] to announce a new era of cooperation and the creation of economic partnerships with the developed countries.”

After the NSC documents--including the Grobmyer letter--were released, the White House argued that they cast Lake and his staff in a positive light. Officials said they showed that the NSC had been a bulwark against the encroachment of controversial fund-raisers into the foreign policy process. White House officials insisted that the documents should force Republican lawmakers to abandon their efforts to try to link the Lake nomination to the fund-raising controversy.

But Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the Intelligence Committee’s chairman, said in an interview that the documents raised more questions than they answered. He added that the NSC’s involvement in the fund-raising matter, including the contacts between Grobmyer and Soderberg, remained a central issue in the Senate panel’s background investigation into Lake.

“We want to find out what role the NSC played, what role Mr. Lake played, directly or indirectly, in the solicitation of funds from foreign subjects or in the ability of foreign donors to gain access to the NSC,” Shelby said.

White House officials now say Soderberg met with Grobmyer as a “courtesy.” Grobmyer and Soderberg declined to comment.