Barbour Says Probe Witness Not Credible

Former Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour said the ex-GOP official who contradicted him while testifying before Senate campaign fund-raising investigators was not a credible witness.

“The Democrats want to put on anybody who contradicts me because . . . they just want to make it personal and try to smear me personally,” said Barbour on CNN’s “Evans & Novak” show Saturday.

Richard Richards, a former GOP chairman from the 1980s, told Senate campaign investigators last week that in the summer of 1994, Barbour asked him to approach a Hong Kong businessman about guaranteeing a loan for the nonprofit National Policy Forum, which Barbour had formed.

Senate Democrats want to show that Barbour sent most of the $2.1-million loan proceeds guaranteed by Hong Kong businessman Ambrous Tung Young to the Republican Party to repay an old debt and free up cash on the eve of the 1994 congressional election.

Earlier in the week, Barbour testified he was aware only that the loan guarantee came from the U.S. subsidiary of a Hong Kong company, and he contended that the Republican Party didn’t need any extra cash to win a majority in Congress that fall.

“If we had not gotten this money, we had millions to spare,” Barbour repeated Saturday. “You notice that the Democrats chose not to put on anybody from the accounting department . . . who could validate . . . what I said. Instead they put on a witness who said himself in his testimony he didn’t know what happened to the money.”

Barbour said Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who is heading the congressional investigation, knows that the GOP did nothing wrong but is “bending over backwards to make it a bipartisan investigation.”

Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), who questioned Barbour relentlessly during hearings last week, charged that the former RNC chairman is the one who’s mistaken--not Richards.

“The filings of the Republican National Committee . . . indicate they only had $700,000 left 19 days before an election. They were in financial trouble, and this money bailed them out,” Torricelli said on CNN’s “Inside Politics Weekend” on Saturday.

“I think Haley Barbour made a real mistake coming forward and trying to defend these activities. They are not defendable,” he said.