Campaign Fund Probe to Shift Focus to Gore

It is a political confrontation of a unique and unusually intimate sort.

This week, hearings on campaign fund-raising, chaired by Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), are scheduled to turn the spotlight on the man whose former Senate seat Thompson now holds: Vice President Al Gore.

When the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee reconvenes, it will focus on a fund-raiser Gore attended last April at a Buddhist temple outside Los Angeles--a site Democrats later acknowledged was painfully inappropriate. It is unlikely Gore will be called to testify himself, but photographs of the vice president at the temple and questions about his role will be prominent.

With Gore considered the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination three years from now, and Thompson a potential contender for the GOP nod, the week’s proceedings may someday be seen as a crucial early skirmish in the 2000 race for the White House. They also mark the first collision of two ambitious and skilled Tennessee politicians who have managed to stay almost entirely out of each other’s way throughout their careers.

“They never were adversaries,” said one Gore intimate, “because they never had to be.”

That all will change this week, as Thompson summons a series of witnesses from the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights for what could prove the most colorful, and widely televised, testimony of the hearings so far. And though the temple affair is likely the most dramatic, it is only one of the committee’s lines of inquiry that could lead to Gore. Others range from questions about the vice president’s role in the overall Democratic campaign fund-raising efforts, particularly solicitation calls he made from his office, and the role of his former Senate chief of staff in lobbying for major Democratic donors who did business with the administration.

“There is substantial exposure left” for the vice president in the hearings, said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a member of the investigating committee. Gore’s role in the controversy, he added, will face “substantial questioning.”

With Republicans pointed down that track, the investigation poses a direct political risk for Gore. But the proceedings are proving to contain a surprising degree of political risk as well for Thompson, who appeared with other potential GOP presidential aspirants last month at a party gathering in Indianapolis.

Second-Guessing From Unhappy Republicans

Widely heralded as a rising GOP star after his election in 1994, Thompson has faced second-guessing from Republicans unhappy with his willingness to look into alleged GOP fund-raising abuses. Democrats question his allegations that there is an ongoing Chinese plot to “subvert” American elections. While the hearings in July advanced the story of the 1996 fund-raising abuses on many fronts, they have not yet produced a blockbuster revelation to rivet the public’s attention.

“Presumably the hearings offered Thompson an opportunity to catapult onto the national stage,” said Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster. “But that opportunity is slipping away from him.”

Thompson has done his best to discourage such analysis. On NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” earlier this summer, he forcefully pointed out that he has not “actively considered or . . . done anything” to prepare for a possible presidential bid. And he disputes the notion that the inquiry has taken particular aim at Gore, as many Democrats allege.

During an interview in his Senate office amid the first round of hearings, Thompson was asked to what extent the committee’s investigation focused on Gore. “I’ve not talked about any individual, whether it be the president or the vice president or anybody else in terms of where they stand in the order of things,” he said after taking a deep breath. “I’m not going to do that, and I don’t think it would be fair.”

Yet Thompson appears keenly aware of the drama inherent in the implicit showdown between Tennessee’s two best-known politicians: “Never occurred to me . . . ,” Thompson said--before breaking into a broad grin.

Administration officials maintain that, in fact, Thompson is gunning for Gore.

“The Republicans are focusing their attacks on the vice president every chance they get, and I think it has everything to do with 2000 politics,” said a White House official. “Sen. Thompson has repeatedly said in Washington that his hearings are not about politics . . . but then he goes to the Republican beauty contest in Indianapolis and uses the hearings, as reported, as the centerpiece of his partisan political stump speech.”

While the Senate inquiry marks the first direct clash of interests between the two men, they long have worked at cross-purposes. In 1970, for example, Thompson--then a young attorney--worked in the Senate campaign of Republican Bill Brock, who unseated Gore’s father, Al Gore Sr. And in 1994, Gore campaigned for Democrat Jim Cooper, whom Thompson swept past to capture the seat Gore vacated when he was elected vice president.

In between, the two did not often cross paths. Gore, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976, has spent most of the past 20 years in Washington. After serving as the chief Republican counsel on the Senate committee investigating Watergate in the early 1970s, Thompson shuttled between the capital, Tennessee and Hollywood, where he carved out a profitable sideline portraying gruff authority figures in movies like “The Hunt for Red October” and “Die Hard 2.”

“They are not close friends . . . , but they probably do have a mutual respect,” said M. Lee Smith, a law school classmate of Thompson’s at Vanderbilt University and the publisher of the Tennessee Journal, a political newsletter.

Study in Contrasts Between the Two

In personal style, the two men offer a study in contrasts. Gore, 50, has always been seen as a straight arrow--a buttoned-down senator’s son so methodical and cautious that he has jokingly compared himself to a mechanical robot. Thompson, 54, has a shambling, even roguish, charm that hints of a man whose idea of long-term planning is to buy his wine by the case instead of the bottle.

In each instance, the picture can be overly simplified: Off camera, Gore can be bitingly funny, and beneath his easygoing manner, Thompson has shown an eye for the brass ring in his steady rise from the tiny Tennessee town of Lawrenceburg.

Yet the basic portrait remains accurate: Many who know him say Thompson isn’t as single-mindedly focused on winning the presidency as Gore--or for that matter, the other nationally prominent politician in Tennessee, the former Republican governor and 1996 presidential candidate Lamar Alexander. Characteristically, Alexander is already assembling support for a second bid in 2000 that could prove a major hurdle for Thompson should he decide to run, because the two men’s bases of financial support largely overlap.

“Lamar and Gore don’t go to lunch without calculating how it will affect their prospects of possibly winning the presidency,” Smith said. “Thompson is much more laid back in his approach to that, and to all things really. Some say he’s lazy. I don’t think he’s lazy, but he is just more of a live-and-let-live individual in a lot of respects, including whether he would run for president.”

Given their personalities, it’s almost ironic that it is the circumspect vice president who finds himself accused of cutting corners in the search for campaign cash. The hearings have already produced one new revelation about Gore: He attended a private Democratic National Committee dinner in 1993 whose other participants included John Huang, who was then still at the Indonesia-based Lippo Group, and the head of a Chinese government-owned company that is a Lippo business partner.

Gore finds himself in the committee’s sights initially over his appearance at the April 29, 1996, lunch at the Hsi Lai Temple that raised $140,000. Democrats later acknowledged that it was inappropriate to hold the event--organized by Huang and Los Angeles immigration counselor Maria L. Hsia--in a Buddhist temple. Eventually the party was forced to return nearly half the money after it could not verify that the donors were legal residents or that the individuals who made the donations were the actual sources of the funds.

Temple officials have told reporters and investigators that the temple reimbursed about a dozen nuns and temple devotees for their contributions. Federal law prohibits such a reimbursement and requires the disclosure of the true source of funds.

When the temple fund-raiser was first disclosed, Gore said he believed it was only a “community event.” Later, his staff acknowledged that he knew the session was “finance-related.” But he has continued to insist that he did not believe the event was a fund-raiser.

Committee Republicans have released some documents attempting to challenge that portrayal. But in the hearings’ first week, former Democratic National Committee Finance Director Richard Sullivan supported Gore’s account, saying Huang had assured both him and the vice president’s staff that no one was required to make a contribution to attend the lunch. Sullivan also testified that Gore had been unaware money was collected at the lunch. Those attending included people who had already donated to the DNC, potential future donors and those who brought checks to the event itself.

The temple event had sparked some of the most intense backstage squabbling of the Senate investigation. Committee Democrats initially resisted the GOP’s efforts to provide immunity for several key witnesses involved in the incident before joining the majority in voting to do so. Republican staffers had maintained that the Democrats were attempting to protect Gore.

Appearance by Gore Unresolved

Still unresolved is whether the committee will seek testimony from Gore--on either the temple event or his broader role in the Clinton financial effort, particularly the more than 75 telephone calls Gore made from the White House to solicit campaign funds. Committee investigators say Thompson would not take such a step lightly.

“It’s under consideration as to whether to invite him to come up here and provide us information or to give him the opportunity to do so,” a Senate committee source said last week.

For its part, Gore’s staff has provided the committee with thousands of internal documents, including schedules, e-mail and memorandums. A handful of former and current Gore staffers have been questioned under oath by committee investigators.

But a Gore staffer said the vice president does not expect to be questioned “because there is nothing they would need to talk to him about. They can get everything they need from the people they have deposed or will depose in the future.”

Brownback nonetheless maintains that the committee may raise enough questions about the vice president’s activities that Gore could ultimately decide it is in his own interest to give his side.

“I’d love to have him up here to testify,” he said.