Conflicting Accounts of Money Calls Haunt Gore

WASHINGTON —  In a new blow to its credibility, Vice President Al Gore’s staff has provided conflicting accounts of whether Gore had consulted with his aides about the legality of soliciting scores of major campaign contributors from the White House before doing so.

Gore’s spokeswoman, Lorraine Voles, said in an interview Wednesday that Gore placed the calls to the donors in 1995 and 1996 without checking about their propriety with White House lawyers or his staff. She said Gore assumed that the Democratic National Committee, which asked him to make the calls, had determined that they would not violate any laws.

But late Friday evening, after her statement had been prominently included in an article that appeared in some editions of The Times, Voles, who is Gore’s communications director, said she was mistaken.

“He [Gore] checked with staffers, not lawyers,” Voles said, declining to identify the individuals. “He checked if making the phone calls from his office was OK.”

This is the latest instance in which the way Gore and his staff have responded to the controversies over his role in fund-raising episodes has only raised additional questions and further inflamed suspicions.

Gore initially said he understood that an April 1996 fund-raiser at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif., was a “community outreach” event; later he acknowledged that he knew the event was “finance-related.” Last March, Gore said at a news conference that he had made calls to donors from his office on “a few occasions;” subsequently it was disclosed that he placed more than 70 calls on multiple dates from November 1995 through spring 1996.

Whether Gore sought others’ views before placing the fund-raising calls from the White House is noteworthy because interviews with Gore associates indicate that those actions differed sharply from his previous practice. During the 16 years he served in the House and the Senate, Gore went so far as to go to a nearby Capitol Hill apartment owned by his parents in order to avoid soliciting from his government offices.

Some longtime Gore supporters voiced amazement at his risky White House solicitations, which have prompted Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to open a 30-day assessment of whether the calls merit appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the matter.

Among veteran politicians, “Gore’s a pretty cautious guy,” said a senior advisor to President Clinton who was an architect of the 1996 fund-raising strategy. “I attribute it to bad staff advice. . . . I can’t imagine him running a risk on that.”

The vice president and his supporters insist that his calls to donors were legal. Others contend that they violated a provision of federal law that prohibits fund-raising in government offices.

The dispute over the legality of the calls now figures to have an impact not only on the fate of the broader political fund-raising controversy but also on Gore’s presidential prospects in 2000.

Given the broad mandate of independent counsels and the manner in which their inquiries tend to expand, such an investigation could take on a life of its own. An independent prosecutor could end up spending years exploring various allegations involving Gore, Clinton or others inside the administration and elsewhere.

For now, Gore, 49, is seeking to say as little publicly as possible regarding the controversy, directing aides and other surrogates to make his case as Senate hearings into campaign finance practices focus on his conduct. Without question, Gore is facing a major career test.

A senior administration advisor, who spoke on a condition of anonymity, said both Clinton and Gore were well aware that it was essential to raise money from major donors to pay for a preemptive TV advertising campaign in 1995 and early 1996. Analysts credit the commercials, which cost the DNC nearly $42 million and portrayed Republicans as reckless threats to Medicare, with helping to reverse the Democrats’ decline and preparing the ground for Clinton’s reelection.

“He did an enormous amount of fund-raising,” the advisor said of Gore. “He was a good soldier. And I never saw reluctance on his part. In terms of where they made the calls from . . . I think we all had a working assumption that it was the better part of discretion for even the vice president not to make phone calls from the White House.”

After being given a series of questions from The Times early last week, Voles initially said: “The vice president was asked to raise money by the DNC. And he made an assumption--we all made an assumption--that what he was asked to do was appropriate.”

During the same interview, however, Voles also said Gore made the calls from his office “because he was assured that the phone calls were appropriate.” Asked by whom he was given such assurance, she replied: “By his staff.”

Voles was then asked to reconcile her contradictory explanations. She subsequently checked with other staff members and told The Times that her first response was correct: that Gore had “assumed the calls were appropriate.”

But late Friday night, Voles said there had been “a misunderstanding” between herself and Gore’s counsel, Charles Burson, who she said told her that the vice president, before making the calls, checked with staffers but not with legal counsel.

Gore, at a news conference on March 3, 1996, said Burson had assured him after the election there was “no controlling legal authority” that would make the calls illegal. “Everything that I did I understood to be lawful,” Gore said. Regarding his White House phone soliciting, Gore said: “I was advised there was nothing wrong with that practice.”

Clearly, Gore is no newcomer to the sensitivity of soliciting campaign money from a government office.

Voles confirmed that Gore did not make fund-raising solicitations from his congressional offices. Even when Gore phoned some fund-raisers from his Senate office in 1988 seeking help in retiring his campaign debt, Voles said, “those calls were not direct solicitations for money.’

As for Gore’s phone solicitations from the White House, the vice president and his aides now say the calls were legal on two grounds: First, that the law at issue was intended to prevent government employees from shaking down subordinates at work. Secondly, that Gore was seeking to raise only “soft” money for Democratic party uses, which is largely unregulated, rather than “hard” money for campaign expenses, which is strictly regulated.

That latter contention has been attacked by Republican critics, who note that some of the money raised by Gore was later used as hard money. Moreover, White House memos distributed to Gore, Clinton and their top aides stressed the importance of raising hard money--including from major donors.

Whether Gore knowingly raised hard money in addition to soft money is part of what Reno is assessing in deciding whether to seek appointment of an independent counsel.

There is considerable disagreement over the nature of the money Gore raised through the calls.

In interviews with The Times, current and former White House aides offered differing views of whether Gore understood that $20,000 from major donors’ contributions was being routinely apportioned to a hard campaign money account by the Democratic Party.

“The president and vice president were, I would say, dimly aware of that,” said the senior Clinton advisor. “Did they focus on that with the energy of a laser? No. . . . But they did understand that [the scarcity of] hard money was a problem. . . . Hard money is called hard money because it’s hard to raise, and therefore there’s a premium on it.”

Moreover, the DNC recently reimbursed the government $24.20 and paid the Clinton-Gore campaign more than $50--after they verified that Gore did not charge all of his long-distance solicitation calls to the party--as he claimed in March. Gore’s billing of those calls to the Clinton-Gore campaign may support the claim that he regarded them as directly related to the reelection, which was a hard-money purpose.

Gore, Voles said, “was not aware the money was being redesignated” by the DNC as hard money.

Gore’s defenders question the fairness of appointing an independent counsel over such a technical matter.

“If Gore had made precisely the same calls either from the Hay-Adams [Hotel], a block away from the White House, or from the DNC, nobody would say there was anything unlawful,” said Richard Goodstein, a Washington lobbyist and Gore loyalist. “Are we truly at a point where we’re prepared to put ourselves to the expense and the turmoil of an independent counsel around that itty-bitty distinction about where he made the calls from?”