Donor Probe to Focus on What Money Bought

Senate campaign fund-raising investigators have no grainy videotape of a big donor handing over a sack of money with one hand and snatching a government contract with the other. Nor have they unearthed a smoking-gun memo in which a White House official spells out a quid pro quo in damning black ink.

Nonetheless, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee is seeking to build a case that some major contributors to the Democratic National Committee were not acting out of high-minded principle when they wrote their checks; instead, they expected, and sometimes received, the ear of top policymakers and favorable government action.

Nearing the end of a monthlong intermission, the committee’s hearings resume after Labor Day with a crowded agenda that will include the controversial Buddhist temple fund-raiser attended by Vice President Al Gore and more detail on the climate inside the White House during last year’s presidential money chase.

Those expected to be questioned about White House coffee klatches, Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers and other fund-raising methods are former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes; Margaret Williams, former chief of staff to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; and former DNC Chairman Donald L. Fowler.

“Why were people getting in [to the White House] who shouldn’t have been?” a Senate investigator asked, summarizing the questions to be raised in the coming weeks. “How was this environment created that allowed these things that stink to high heaven to happen? We’ll look at the ways that the White House was used as a money-making machine. And we’ll take a look at some of these seamier instances, what we call the quid pro quos.”

Yet it is difficult, without surveillance cameras or glimpses into givers’ minds, to demonstrate conclusively that a quid is connected to a quo.

The refrain from most politicians is that donors give to elected officials who already support their positions, not to influence lawmakers to take particular actions. And anyway, they argue, so many checks are written by so many givers that governmental decision-making remains above the fray of fund-raising.

President Clinton says contributors enjoy no special influence over policy decisions made by his administration.

“I never made a decision for anybody because they were contributors of mine,” Clinton said in January. “Nobody buys a guaranteed result--nor should they ever.” What did donors get? No more than a “respectful hearing,” he said.

But Republicans plan to challenge those remarks, focusing on cases--first raised by the news media--involving everything from bananas to nursing homes to a failed coup attempt in Paraguay.

The banana dispute began in 1993, when the European Union implemented trade policies favoring banana growers in the former European colonies of the Caribbean over such powerhouse U.S. banana concerns as Dole, Chiquita and Del Monte, which operate in Latin America.

Cincinnati-based Chiquita cried the loudest, and the U.S. trade representative took its fight to the World Trade Organization, which issued a report favoring Chiquita’s stance.

Senate investigators are interested in the hefty political contributions from business magnate Carl Lindner, who has given the Democratic Party more than $1 million in corporate and individual contributions in recent years and was one of the donors rewarded with an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. Lindner, who runs the company that oversees Chiquita, pushed his position in meetings with former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor.

The Senate in early August issued subpoenas to Lindner and Chiquita seeking documents on the matter. Kantor, who was not subpoenaed, insists that the decision was made on its merits, was in line with positions taken by the Reagan and Bush administrations years before and did not go as far as Chiquita would have liked.

“Any suggestion that there was politics involved is not correct,” Kantor said in an interview.

If so, Kantor and his aides were among a very few in official Washington unaware of the political largess Lindner has long extended to both parties. In fact, it was former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole who arranged Lindner’s breakfast meetings with Kantor at the Watergate Hotel. Lindner also loaned corporate jets to Dole during his presidential campaign.

Investigators also are trying to determine whether there were any connections between nursing home regulations imposed by the Department of Health and Human Services and Alan Solomont, a major Democratic contributor whose ADS Management Co. runs a large chain of nursing homes. They have subpoenaed Solomont--now the DNC’s finance chairman--who had meetings with HHS Secretary Donna Shalala to press for less stringent nursing-home rules.

Solomont said through a DNC spokesman that he intends to cooperate with the committee. “Mr. Solomont stands by his earlier statement that he has not before and does not now combine his fund-raising and advocacy activities in an inappropriate way,” said DNC spokesman Steve Langdon.

Peter Knight, a lobbyist who took a leave to run the Clinton/Gore reelection effort, has also received a Senate subpoena. A close Gore associate, Knight helped set up the controversial fund-raising calls the vice president made from his White House office.

He also helped Democratic donor Molten Metal Technology Inc. win several extensions of funding from the Energy Department. In one 1996 case, the department awarded $2 million in contracts to Molten Metal--three days after the Democratic Party recorded a $10,000 donation from the company--even though a federal review team had recommended no more funding months earlier. The company said it wrote the donation check weeks before the extension was granted.

But Senate investigators have subpoenaed records from both Molten Metal and its president, William Haney, a former Gore campaign staffer. Meanwhile, Energy’s inspector general is reviewing close contacts between Knight and recently departed Energy Undersecretary Thomas Grumbly to determine whether contracts were improperly awarded.

Investigators also are looking into reports that Nathan Landow, a longtime Gore fund-raiser, sought a lobbying contract with the Cheyenne-Arapaho Indians of Oklahoma to help them recover tribal lands. Tribal leaders have said Landow told them they would not get their land back if they did not hire Landow and Knight, who were not retained.

Nevertheless, Democratic fund-raisers persuaded tribal leaders to donate $107,000 to the party, which got them into a lunch with Clinton at the White House, where they pleaded their case. In March, the DNC returned the money after the Washington Post reported it came from the destitute tribe’s welfare fund, set up to help members with heating bills and other emergencies.

Senate subpoenas have also gone to Future Tech International, a Miami-based computer company, and its president, DNC donor Mark Jimenez. Last spring, Jimenez tipped off the White House to the possibility of a military coup in Paraguay, where he does business, prompting U.S. officials to work through the Organization of American States to quell the uprising.

The very day the unsuccessful coup attempt began, Jimenez gave the DNC $100,000. “I saved democracy in Paraguay,” he boasted to the Wall Street Journal.

In another case, investigators are looking into the single-largest donation returned by the DNC, the one that caused the overseas money scandal to hit the headlines almost a year ago.

The committee has subpoenaed records from two Los Angeles residents, Won and Lucy Ham, who were directors for Cheong Am America Inc., a subsidiary of a South Korean electronics company that gave the Democrats an illegal $250,000 donation.

In April 1996, the Hams had a private meeting with Clinton at a Washington hotel with the head of Cheong Am, John H. K. Lee, and Carson Mayor Mike Mitoma, an international business consultant.

Lee arranged the session to inform the president that Cheong Am was seeking a U.S. partner for its expansion into Southern California, perhaps hoping for assistance. The administration never aided Cheong Am, but for roughly $50,000 a minute, the South Korean executive made his pitch directly to the president of the United States.

Times staff writer Alan C. Miller contributed to this story.