Democrats Raise Heat on Upcoming Hearings

The White House and Democratic Party on Wednesday launched a concerted effort to discredit upcoming Senate congressional hearings into campaign fund-raising abuses, while Republicans leading a separate House investigation sought to quell disarray within their own ranks.

In tones echoing their long-running campaign to stymie myriad Whitewater inquiries, White House officials declared that the congressional hearings set to begin next week will produce highly partisan GOP attacks rather than explore serious campaign finance improprieties in “evenhanded” ways.

Republicans dismissed the criticism, countering that their probes are proceeding on course and the Senate hearings will provide substantive revelations.

“I think [Democrats] are worried,” said Paul S. Clark, communications director for the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. “I think they are concerned the hearings will be a catastrophe for them and they are doing everything within their power to combat that from happening.”

However, Republicans are grappling with upheaval within the House investigative staff and some criticisms that the Senate committee hasn’t fully organized the hearings only five days before they debut on national television.

The latest developments unfolded at a pivotal moment in the 10-month-old foreign donations scandal. At stake is whether the evidence presented during the hearings will persuade the American public that the Democratic fund-raising fiasco is a serious national problem that demands action--or another skirmish in the continuing war of divided government since President Clinton took office.

The Senate hearings are expected to focus on allegations that vast amounts of foreign money were pumped into the Democrats’ 1996 presidential campaign in violation of campaign finance laws. The committee is expected to examine whether foreign sources who donated large sums of money sought and received special favors from the president and his administration.

Separately, the Justice Department is investigating allegations involving systematic efforts by the Chinese government to funnel money into the Democratic Party and potential acts of economic espionage by fund-raiser John Huang while he was at the Commerce Department.

Witness lists released on Wednesday for the first two weeks of Senate hearings show that they will focus on a wide range of topics, from the alleged laundering of donations at the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights that hosted a fund-raiser featuring Vice President Al Gore to the activities of Huang, who worked for the Indonesia-based conglomerate Lippo Group before joining the Commerce Department and later becoming a controversial Democratic National Committee fund-raiser.

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Among the witnesses expected to appear are John Dickerson, a CIA employee who provided regular intelligence briefings to Huang, and Janice Stewart, Huang’s secretary at Commerce. Others include Yogesh K. Gandhi, the Northern California man who paid $325,000 to present the president with a bust of Mahatma Gandhi, White House aides Bruce Lindsey and Maggie Williams and Harold M. Ickes, the former administration official who coordinated the president’s reelection campaign.

The fund-raising controversy began last fall with the disclosure of an illegal $250,000 contribution from a South Korean company to the DNC. The committee eventually returned a total of $3 million in tainted donations, much of it solicited by Huang, who is refusing to cooperate with Senate investigators.

In a sharp break from a relatively peaceful relationship between the Clinton administration and the Senate committee headed by Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), the White house launched a political counteroffensive Wednesday aimed at convincing Americans that Republicans are using the hearings as the basis for partisan attacks.

Administration officials arranged a series of private briefings with major news organizations to criticize Thompson for abandoning his commitment to lead an impartial investigation by concentrating on Democratic fund-raising excesses while virtually ignoring GOP problems.

The officials said congressional committees have issued 442 subpoenas seeking information from Democratic targets since June 18, compared to only 34 for GOP subjects. Similarly, the White House and DNC have provided more than 525,000 pages of documents to congressional committees, compared to 11,000 by the Republican National Committee, according to the White House.

“Up to now, the investigations have been about politics, not a search for the truth,” said special White House counsel Lanny Davis.

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Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee announced it had turned over 80,000 pages of documents sought by Senate and House investigators.

The RNC on Wednesday allowed reporters to inspect about 500 pages, many reflecting ties between the party and the National Policy Forum, a GOP think tank that received $2.2 million in loan guarantees from a Hong Kong-based company. Party officials maintained that the documents show the RNC had “violated no laws.”

White House officials were quick to cite the Tuesday resignations of three key staffers from the House investigative panel led by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.).

Joseph P. Rowley III, the House committee’s chief counsel, wrote in a resignation letter to Burton: “Due to the unrelenting ‘self-promoting’ actions of the Committee’s Investigative Coordinator, I have been unable to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney’s office.”

At his daily press briefing, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said, “Of course, it’s of concern when a former U.S. attorney who has been charged with the responsibility of fairly conducting this inquiry says that he’s not allowed to operate in a professional manner. In a way, that’s flabbergasting.”

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), the ranking minority member of the House panel, called on Burton on Wednesday to abandon his investigation and leave the job to the Senate.

“I don’t see any way for the House to conduct a fair, credible investigation,” Waxman said.

Times staff writers Robert L. Jackson, Mark Gladstone and Dina Bass contributed to this story.