At Hearings, Real Action Is in Hallway

Although still in its infancy, the Senate’s campaign fund-raising show is off to a rocky start. Television is tuned out. Senators appear ill-prepared for complicated questioning.

And the real action is taking place during “spin” sessions outside the hearing room when the committee chairman, Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), orders a bathroom break.

Still, those scripting the affair say it is far too early to write off the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearings as a bust.

“We’ve only had one witness and two days of testimony,” said Paul Clark, the panel’s spokesman. “It’s like a good novel. You have to start at the beginning and follow it through to the end.”

And for all the media ambivalence, the opposing political forces clearly are treating the hearings like World War III. Indeed, out in the hallway, the political jockeying is rivaling anything at the hearing itself.

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The White House and the Democratic National Committee have a flying wing of aides and lawyers deployed around the process, ginning up instant news releases and countering every charge with a fresh sound bite. “Nothing new,” White House special counsel Lanny Davis says again and again to the pack of journalists who surround him.

A few feet away, GOP committee investigators lay out their theories on how overseas donations may have found their way into DNC coffers, thus violating U.S. election law. But the investigators are greatly outnumbered by Democratic press aides pooh-poohing any revelations as old news.

“If the committee can do nothing more than recycle old press reports, let’s get on with campaign finance reform,” said one hallway analysis prepared by the White House. “Surely Congress can do more with its time than spend taxpayer money repeating what has already been reported for months.”

Clark, the committee spokesman, scoffed at such early reviews.

“We’re not playing badminton here,” he said. “It shouldn’t be us-versus-them and who won and who lost. These are serious allegations about foreign involvement in our election. We should all, Republican and Democrat, join together to find out what went wrong.”

At the moment, however, the sides remain apart on one of the key early questions facing the panel--whether to grant limited legal immunity to John Huang, the central figure in the probe, in return for his testimony.

Republican and Democratic lawyers for the committee met with Huang’s attorney on Friday to discuss the outlines of the former DNC fund-raiser’s potential testimony. At meeting’s end, the Republicans continued to express strong reservations about immunity, while the Democrats seemed more inclined to grant it, sources said.

As the first week of the monthlong hearings came to a close, neither Republicans nor Democrats were completely pleased with how they have come off. There was disorganization in the GOP ranks that made their senators’ questioning of former DNC Finance Director Richard Sullivan, the week’s lone witness, appear scattershot. Senators jumped abruptly from White House coffees one minute to Huang’s pay scale the next, leaving observers scratching their heads for a theme.

Democratic senators, meanwhile, were caught flat-footed at times amid talk of overseas wire transfers and a secret Chinese government plot to influence the ’96 campaign.

Although the leadoff witness did provide some insights into why the DNC took in so much tainted money--carelessness, no verification, a mad dash for cash--Republican senators themselves doled out most of the hearings’ real news.

By distributing copies of canceled checks, bank records and other documents, the committee showed that two California entrepreneurs received a total of $650,000 from Asia within days of making substantial donations to the Democratic Party.

The committee’s Democrats have played the role of defense attorneys, downplaying everything. They also have aired Republican fund-raising abuses in an attempt to show that neither party can claim to be above the ugly reality of modern-day politics.

But was anybody watching?

Television cameras filmed all the action, but showed little. On opening day, the Senate hearing competed against a hearing in Las Vegas on punishing heavyweight fighter Mike Tyson for biting Evander Holyfield, as well as telegenic images beamed back by the Mars probe.

Live coverage has been mostly nonexistent. And ABC’s evening news ignored altogether Sullivan’s first day of testimony.

On the eve of the hearings, some Republicans were anticipating that the charismatic Thompson, a part-time actor and oft-mentioned presidential prospect, would emerge as a star in the living rooms of America. But the TV networks have failed to do their part.

Even C-SPAN and PBS have not come through. PBS covered the Whitewater hearings live two years ago, but only about two dozen of its 349 stations carried the broadcasts. So this week, PBS stuck with its regular daytime fare of children’s shows.

C-SPAN, which is under contract to cover the House and Senate sessions by day, has been rebroadcasting Thompson & Co. by night.

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Still, the networks are present in force at the hearings, with a dozen or more cameras rolling. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, says coverage might pick up if the hearings become better political theater with a clearer plot line.

Senate investigators say they have just begun. As the hearings continue next week, executives from the LippoBank, which employed Huang, will be questioned about the embattled fund-raiser’s relationship with the giant Indonesian conglomerate. And a CIA official, John Dickerson, will testify about the classified briefings Huang received from him while Huang was a deputy assistant secretary at the Commerce Department--the job he held before going to the DNC. Some Republicans have questioned whether Huang passed this information on to foreign sources.

Stay tuned. If you can.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.