Senator Accepts Dole Offer to Testify on Fund-Raising

The chairman of the Senate committee investigating political fund-raising abuses on Thursday accepted an offer by former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole to testify under oath about allegations of improper financing of last year’s election--and urged President Clinton to testify too.

Clinton and Dole have come under fire in recent weeks for soliciting unlimited “soft money” donations to their respective parties to get around the $1,000 individual contribution limit and produce so-called issue ads to promote their campaigns.

The committee chairman, Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), previously had expressed reluctance to ask Clinton or Vice President Al Gore to appear before his panel to defend their campaign practices. It is rare for a sitting president to appear before a congressional investigative committee. The last time was when President Ford appeared before a House subcommittee in 1974 to answer questions about his pardon of Richard Nixon.

The White House had no comment on Thursday’s developments.

Dole’s letter to Thompson and Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), the ranking minority member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, came as a “surprise,” said a Republican committee spokesman.

wrote: “Recently, there have been some statements questioning my activities as a candidate and some that cast doubt on my integrity. While I do not believe that I, personally, participated in any questionable activity or personally violated any existing law, I am prepared to voluntarily come before your committee and submit to questions, under oath, that any member of your committee may have.”

Dole said that he hopes his offer will “encourage” Clinton to testify as well. Thompson responded by issuing a statement that he is “very pleased” by Dole’s offer and intends to invite the president to appear before the committee.

Thompson said at Wednesday’s hearing that recently released videotapes of White House coffees and Democratic National Committee fund-raisers offer potentially damaging evidence that Clinton’s 1996 campaign violated federal election law by using party funds to pay for advertising aimed at reelecting the president.

Republicans on the Senate committee plan to send a legal brief to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno explaining how they believe the Clinton-Gore campaign broke election laws and reiterating their calls for the appointment of an independent counsel.

Democratic committee members have argued that both major parties paid for 1996 ads to rally support for their presidential candidates and that the practice was within the law.

Thursday’s hearing, meanwhile, was dominated by the controversy over White House videotapes. The White House communications unit that connects the president electronically with foreign leaders acknowledged that it had bungled a simple fax.

Somehow, the embarrassed experts testified, one page of a four-page memo detailing Senate subpoena requests--including materials related to White House coffees--disappeared by the time it was plucked from the fax machine at the White House Communications Agency, which videotaped the controversial events.

“It could have been a technical problem in that our fax machine did not print it,” offered Col. Charles Campbell. “The other option is it did print and it fell off the fax machine onto the floor.”

But Thompson continued to suggest that the White House intentionally withheld the videotapes, which were released more than six months after Senate investigators subpoenaed them.

“Everybody knows this committee has a [Dec. 31] cutoff date, and I have accused the White House of slow-walking and foot-dragging, and I stand by that accusation,” Thompson said. “It is a remarkable performance.”

But White House officials said that Thursday’s testimony pointed toward a simple glitch by career military officials there, not an intentional effort by political aides to keep the tapes out of Senate hands.

“The events of these past few months vividly demonstrate that the White House staff has diligently complied with the committee’s requests and has repeatedly delivered documents as we have discovered them--whether some would see them as embarrassing or not--as rapidly as possible,” White House Special Counsel Lanny Breuer said in a statement.

Senate investigators requested the videotapes in an April 9 letter to White House lawyers.

White House Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff then summed up the Senate’s request in a four-page memo to presidential aides. The word “videotape” was eliminated in the editing process.

Ruff’s memo was distributed widely throughout the White House, including to the Military Affairs Office that oversees the communications unit. Somehow, however, between the time military affairs officials faxed the memo to their various departments and it arrived on Campbell’s desk, a page was lost.

It was the missing page that mentioned White House coffees, and Campbell and his colleague, Chief Petty Officer Charles McGrath, testified that, if they had seen it, the videotapes would have been turned over sooner.