Thompson Says Hearings Point to Chinese Role

The chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee said Friday that the first phase of the panel’s hearings on campaign finance abuses has laid the groundwork for a circumstantial case that the Chinese government sought to influence the 1996 election.

“Clearly there has been no proof that the Chinese government . . . is sending money from their treasury over here [but] there is circumstantial evidence that raises serious questions,” said Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.).

After four weeks of hearings, several key players in the probe were eager Friday to put things in perspective. Their views, however, differed markedly.

Democrats called Thompson’s case weak and said the clear message of the hearings is that both political parties received illegal foreign money in 1996 and that the campaign finance system itself is a mess.

It was Thompson who raised the specter of a Chinese plot in a July 9 statement that opened the hearings. In dramatic remarks, he announced that evidence showed that Beijing had devised a plan to illegally influence last year’s elections, including the presidential contest.

The remarks have haunted him ever since.

Democrats immediately accused him of exaggerating the intelligence data Thompson cited as evidence. And the alleged plot now looms over all aspects of the proceedings, with every piece of evidence judged on whether it proves the plot.

Still, Thompson insists that the hearings, scheduled to resume in September, have revealed clear-cut illegalities and will continue to bear fruit.

“We’ve kind of gotten to the point where if you don’t have a signed confession or John Dean [a central figure in the Watergate case] then . . . it’s kind of a failure,” he told reporters. “I don’t think ultimately that’s the way it will be.”

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Democrats concede that their party’s fund-raising practices veered sharply from what is legal. But they taunt Thompson for not proving any Chinese plot.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that there was a lot of illegal money floating around the campaign,” Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said Friday. “We knew that going in.” But the push to tie the White House to illegal Chinese activity is off the mark, he said.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) agreed, saying: “The early statement of the chairman that there was evidence he saw that the Chinese government put money into the presidential race cast a long shadow on this first month. They produced no evidence to support that.”

Democrats argue that the one thing that has been proved in the first month is that the fund-raising system is a mess.

“The American political system is on a rising and uncontrollable spiral of financial thirst,” said Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), a prodigious fund-raiser himself. “It may or may not ever be proven that there was a Chinese conspiracy to influence these elections, but it is already clear that the system has invited such illegal participation by the demand for campaign funds. The American campaign finance system has been an accident waiting to happen for years.”

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In September, when senators return from a monthlong recess, the committee plans to pick up the pace of the hearings with streamlined presentations from witnesses.

Among those expected to testify are former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler, former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes and a handful of Buddhist nuns who joined Vice President Al Gore at a controversial fund-raiser at a Southern California temple.

The panel will also look at whether White House policy decisions were affected by political contributions, a contention President Clinton’s aides have repeatedly denied.

Democrats on the committee are eager to move on to an examination of the role of “soft money”--unregulated donations to political parties--and other legal but troubling aspects of the current system.