Senators Hope to Stir Public With Donor Hearings

Senate hearings on campaign funding abuses--the spider web of foreign money, foreign companies and foreign governments wrapped around the 1996 presidential election--begin this week with a parade of witnesses whose tales of laundered contributions and influence peddling could ignite public concern over the role of money in politics.

At issue is more than just how much money it takes to win elections. It is how beholden the winners may be once in office. In short, have foreign interests and others with suspect motives been able to buy into high government councils by secretly providing the huge sums that candidates now need for their elections?

Initially, the 10 to 12 days of hearings this month before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee will focus on President Clinton’s reelection campaign. Potentially most explosive will be evidence, including intelligence intercepts, suggesting that the Chinese government systematically tried to influence the American political process.

Committee Chairman Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) also plans to examine the role of Democratic fund-raiser and former Commerce Department official John Huang, a onetime California businessman who was in frequent contact with the Indonesia-based Lippo Group conglomerate while he was receiving secret intelligence briefings.

Later, Democrats will air foreign contributions benefiting the GOP, including hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Hong Kong-based company that may indirectly have helped Republican congressional candidates in 1994.

Dramatic congressional hearings could break through the public apathy that has helped stymie campaign finance reform thus far. From the Iran-Contra affair and Watergate back to the Army-McCarthy hearings, compelling stories unfolded before congressional committees have repeatedly galvanized public opinion.

The campaign-money hearings will open with striking echoes of that tradition. Thompson first attracted national attention as minority counsel to the Senate panel investigating the Watergate scandal. Media interest is so intense that plans to use the old Senate caucus room of Watergate hearing fame had to be abandoned in favor of a larger space; CNN is scheduled to broadcast the proceedings live, with the other networks providing intermittent coverage. And as in 1973, this week’s hearings will spotlight a president who won reelection by a landslide without necessarily winning an equal measure of voters’ trust.

Yet major obstacles stand before Thompson as he tries to arouse popular demand for campaign reform.

“People don’t understand why it’s a big deal,” said a member of the Governmental Affairs Committee staff. “What they don’t understand is that something goes back for that money. They don’t understand the quid pro quo.”

Thompson also is having trouble lining up the kinds of witnesses who have lent drama to the great congressional investigations of the past. So far at least, most of the crucial figures of the campaign-funding affair are refusing to play their parts.

Huang, whose activities in California, at the Commerce Department and at the Democratic National Committee are central to the case against the Clinton campaign, is invoking his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. James T. Riady, scion of the family that controls Lippo and a longtime friend of the Clintons, is out of the country. So are a host of Asian American, Taiwanese and Chinese witnesses, including Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie, whom investigators suspect of being a Chinese government agent.

The committee will use grants of immunity to compel testimony from at least some witnesses. For others, Thompson and his chief counsel, Michael Madigan, will attempt to convey what happened through the testimony of lesser figures such as Lippo employees, “shadow” donors and Democratic finance staffers.

To tell the tale, for instance, of Vice President Al Gore’s appearance at a fund-raiser at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, members of the temple circle are expected to describe how supposedly impecunious monks and nuns were persuaded to write $5,000 checks for the Democrats--and then were illegally reimbursed.

Similar techniques will be used to delineate Huang’s activities, the amazing generosity of Soraya and Arief Wiriadinata and the unabashed quid-pro-quoing of Maria L. Hsia, Pauline Kanchanalak, Roger Tamraz and other big contributors.

Beyond the problem of obtaining dramatic high-level witnesses, not all Republicans share Thompson’s zeal for reform. “This is a much more partisan atmosphere,” said a committee source whose experience dates back to the Richard Nixon investigations. “The political stresses on the players in this are 10 times greater than in Watergate.

The Committee: Play Within a Play Thompson’s objective is not to compile an exhaustive legal record or even to drop bombshells. There will be no smoking guns, aides say. Rather it is to tell simple, compelling stories that voters will react to.

“If we have productive hearings that inform people, it makes it easier to move into campaign reform, which Thompson dearly wants to do,” an aide said.

For that to happen, Thompson needs at least the appearance of fairness, which will be difficult to project if the Democrats continue to condemn the Republicans as vigilantes with unclean hands.

Already, partisan pressures have produced a poignant drama involving the committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. John Glenn of Ohio.

The former astronaut is, by temperament, well-suited to the above-narrow-partisanship role that then-Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee played as ranking minority member of the Watergate committee. This is also Glenn’s last term in the Senate. But the Ohio senator is under tremendous pressure from his party to oppose the Republicans tooth and claw.

Indeed, the investigation is uncomfortable for many senators in both parties because of their involvement in the same flawed system. Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.), a member of Thompson’s committee, was on the board of the National Policy Forum, the GOP organization accused of improperly collecting foreign contributions.

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As they assay the balancing act before them, Thompson and Madigan have one advantage: They have learned some potentially valuable lessons from walking such ground before.

When Thompson first came to Washington for the Watergate hearings, he thought the whole thing might just blow over. “My own reaction to the case had been a vague feeling that every political campaign has a few crackpots who cause embarrassment,” Thompson recalled afterward. He soon learned it was more than that and stepped away from partisanship.

Madigan earned the name “Mad Dog” as one of the minority counsel’s two chief deputies. But he is expected to follow Thompson’s lead this time and avoid open partisanship.

Thompson, whose Watergate service was followed by a career as an actor (His credits include roles as an FBI agent, a tough government official and a Navy admiral in such films as “Baby’s Day Out,” “Born Yesterday” and “The Hunt for Red October”) also learned the difference between lawyering and theater--a lesson he was reminded of recently by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

During a hearing on another subject, Thompson spent a big chunk of time trying to force Reno to address a legal fine point; Reno easily turned aside his technical questions. Later, Thompson says, he realized that in terms of viewers, she had emerged unscathed while he had wasted a precious opportunity in the camera’s eye.

It’s a mistake he does not intend to repeat this week.

Donors: The Quid Pro Quo

The extraordinary magnitude of the contributions to Clinton’s campaign from questionable donors with foreign ties was evident by election day. What has become clearer in recent months is exactly what those who made such donations got in return.

Clinton’s hunger for money was no secret. More than a year before the election, he had embraced a plan devised by political consultant Dick Morris to launch preemptive television strikes against the Republicans--the Democratic equivalent of the “Harry and Louise” spots that had helped kill the president’s health care plan.

But to pay for early ads, the Clinton team had to raise unprecedented amounts of so-called soft money--individual, corporate and labor contributions to the DNC and other party organizations that would not count against federal limits on donations to individual candidates.

The problems arose when the appetite for soft money came together with opportunistic Asian and Asian American entrepreneurs with ties to foreign companies that could benefit from direct access to the president. It now appears that foreign governments may have sensed the opportunity too.

That the resulting donations came with agendas attached is hardly surprising. Almost no one gives away huge sums of money without expecting something in return. And even the most scrupulous elected officials approach requests from supporters hoping to be able to satisfy them. No politician wants to turn away a benefactor. Often, a wish becomes father to a way.

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Huang and the Riady family illustrate the point.

Not only did the Riadys contribute large sums themselves, but they also raised money from business associates and others. In 1995 and 1996, for instance, the modest-living Wiriadinatas gave the DNC $450,000 at Huang’s urging. Soraya Wiriadinata is the daughter of a Riady business partner.

There was nothing intangible about what the Riadys wanted or got in return. Their business interests sprawl across Asia. They have made Indonesia their home but, as ethnic Chinese, they remain distrusted outsiders. Demonstrating close ties to the U.S. chief of state would be enormously valuable.

The Riadys repeatedly played that card with the Indonesian government. Among other examples, when President Suharto wanted to address an economic summit in 1993, the Riadys and their surrogates repeatedly lobbied Clinton on the idea. Suharto never got an invitation to address the summit, but he did land a one-on-one meeting with Clinton.

On at least two occasions that year and the next, James Riady escorted Indonesian officials on White House visits.

Then there was the special opportunity Huang got at the Commerce Department from 1993 through 1995. He received secret intelligence briefings on economic and trade issues and U.S. negotiating strategies in Asia; all the while, Huang remained in regular contact with his old employers.

The administration says Huang and the Riadys never exerted undue influence. Many policy decisions did go their way, however, whether by coincidence or not. And they unquestionably got the president’s ear when others did not.

Oil financier Roger Tamraz, by contrast, first tried to deal with the administration without offering campaign money.

Only when that failed did he turn to contributions. Again, once the money began to flow, telephones began to ring.

Tamraz, a naturalized U.S. citizen with Mideastern roots, was promoting construction of a pipeline linking Turkey with the oil fields of the Caspian Sea region. In 1995, he discussed his idea with officials at the Energy Department, the State Department and the National Security Council.

All heard him out but offered no endorsement. The NSC’s Sheila Heslin not only told Tamraz he would not get U.S. support, but she wrote a memo urging that he be barred from the White House because she suspected that he was using his access to convince foreign officials he had Washington’s backing.

Stopped at the front door, Tamraz went round to the side. He gave $177,000 to the DNC and state party organizations, with the promise of more to come.

Soon, despite the NSC blackball, Tamraz was being invited to White House functions with Clinton.

DNC Chairman Don Fowler, trying unsuccessfully to reverse the NSC’s objection, went so far as to contact the CIA and ask that a memo be sent to the NSC vouching for Tamraz, who had previously helped the agency. A memo was sent.

And on March 27, 1996, Tamraz lobbied Clinton personally. The president directed senior aide Thomas “Mack” McLarty to look into Tamraz’s pipeline.

The White House now says McLarty learned the plan had already been rejected and told the president no more could be done.

However, the Senate committee and a federal grand jury are investigating the episode, especially Fowler’s intervention at the CIA and the NSC.

In addition to all these now-documented cases, the Senate committee and federal investigators are looking closely at the shadowy activities of Charlie Trie, a modest Little Rock, Ark., restaurateur.

Trie somehow raised large amounts of money for the Democrats, and investigators have discovered he got tens of thousands of dollars from the Bank of China for undisclosed purposes.

Now investigators are exploring whether those funds went to the Democrats as part of a plan masterminded by the Chinese government. If so, the impact on public opinion could be explosive.

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Setting The Stage

* What: Hearings into campaign fund-raising by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

When: Beginning Tuesday at 7 a.m. PDT with opening statements by committee members; first witnesses scheduled for Wednesday.

* Where: Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building, the site of New York Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato’s 1995 Whitewater hearings. Plans to stage the hearings in the small but ornate Russell Caucus Room, site of the famed Watergate hearings, were scrapped to accommodate television crews.

* Television: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and C-SPAN are considering live coverage of portions of the hearings. The other broadcast networks will cover as the news warrants.

* Duration: This round is scheduled for 12 days, to be held on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays through the end of July. The committee plans a second phase in the fall to look at problems inherent in the campaign finance system.

* Key senators: Committee Chairman Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.); John Glenn of Ohio, the committee’s top-ranking Democrat.

* Witnesses: Those who may appear during the first week include Maggie Williams, chief of staff to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; Deputy White House Counsel Bruce R. Lindsey; former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes; former Democratic National Committee co-chairman Don Fowler; former DNC finance chairman Marvin Rosen; former CIA employee John Dickerson; DNC contributor Yogesh K. Gandhi.