Fund-Raising Hearings to Resume Despite Flap

Senators investigating campaign fund-raising abuses met privately with intelligence officials Monday in an attempt to quell a partisan feud over whether China ever implemented a plan to illegally influence U.S. elections.

Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, spotlighted the alleged plot as he opened his panel’s hearings last week on the fund-raising controversies. In an interview Monday, he said his assertions that high-level Chinese government officials crafted a plan designed “to subvert our election process” had been cleared by FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and CIA Director George J. Tenet.

But Democrats on the committee who saw the same intelligence information as Thompson have accused him of exaggerating the facts to make a splash at the hearings’ start.

Senators emerging from Monday’s briefing announced no new breakthroughs to clear up the dispute.

“There’s a real desire to establish some common ground,” said Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), a committee member. But he said nothing to indicate that would occur.

The dispute appears to center on whether intelligence data shows that the Chinese plan was ever implemented and is ongoing, both of which Thompson bluntly stated as fact.

“Although most discussion of the plan focuses on Congress, our investigation suggests that it affected the 1996 presidential race and state elections as well,” Thompson said.

In Monday’s interview, Thompson vehemently defended his four-page statement as firmly based on the evidence. He said intelligence officials carefully reviewed the statement, even redacting some sensitive areas. “The very idea that this kind of [CIA and FBI] review could take place and inaccuracies would not be pointed out is absurd on its face,” Thompson said.

Both the Justice Department and the CIA have issued statements saying they reviewed Thompson’s statement not for the accuracy of his conclusions but to ensure that his words did not compromise their ongoing inquiries.

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Intelligence officials initially objected to Thompson’s characterization of the plan as illegal, recommending that the senator qualify the remark, sources said. When the senator pushed the matter, the officials reportedly went along with Thompson’s initial wording.

The Senate hearings resume today with a series of witnesses who are expected to provide information on former Democratic fund-raiser John Huang’s role at LippoBank in Los Angeles before he joined the Commerce Department. They are expected to discuss how Huang seemed to remain in close contact with Lippo, even after he became a deputy assistant secretary at Commerce. Huang left his Commerce job in late 1995 to raise money for the DNC; the legality of a substantial portion of the contributions he generated has since been questioned.