Squabble Stalls GOP Report Blasting Democratic Fund-Raising Tactics

Discord among Senate Republicans on Tuesday stalled the official release of a 1,500-page GOP report condemning the Democratic fund-raising tactics on behalf of President Clinton’s 1996 reelection.

After investigating campaign finance abuses for the last year, Republican senators on the Governmental Affairs Committee produced a strongly worded document accusing the White House and some of its top aides of repeatedly bending--and openly breaking--fund-raising laws in their zeal for campaign cash to reelect Clinton.

But some Republicans are expressing disagreements with language in the draft report, particularly a chapter analyzing flaws in the existing fund-raising laws. “Several issues need to be discussed,” said Chairman Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who plans a closed meeting with his colleagues today.

In one of its harshest sections, the draft report criticizes a “lack of candor” by Vice President Al Gore, who attended a fund-raising event at a Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif., on April 29, 1996, but later insisted he did not know it was a fund-raiser.

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“Despite his various denials, the vice president was well aware that the event was one designed to raise money for his party,” the draft report says.

Gore spokesman Christopher Lehane disputed the report’s conclusion and said Thompson, a part-time actor, “appears to be auditioning for an Oscar for the most partisan report of the year. There is nothing to support the report’s findings and there is no new news to be found here.”

The draft slams fund-raising telephone calls Clinton and Gore made from the White House, the presidential coffee klatches for big Democratic donors and inadequate vetting of contributors and White House visitors. The written summary also accuses Clinton aides of using “the Nixon White House as their model” in reluctantly and belatedly providing documents.

Jim Kennedy, a White House spokesman, said the Republicans’ report is a waste of taxpayers’ money and failed to make the case for campaign finance reform.

“We do not believe that the president and the White House sidestepped the law, and they were fully within the law in their actions,” he said.

It is the report’s position that the “campaign finance system is in serious need of an overhaul” that irks some GOP senators. Only three of the committee’s nine Republicans--Thompson and Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Susan Collins of Maine--endorsed the McCain-Feingold campaign reform legislation.

“I don’t think the things we see here have anything to do with campaign finance reform,” said Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), who vowed to sign the report but also to give a floor speech outlining his objections.

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The committee held 32 days of bitterly partisan hearings stretching over four months last year, an exercise that never succeeded in fully engaging the public. As they sought to lay out a complicated tale with myriad characters, investigators were constantly frustrated by the refusal of many central figures to cooperate.

The committee report was due Jan. 31, but a series of delays has pushed back its release.

Particularly sensitive have been negotiations with the CIA and FBI over intelligence data suggesting possible Chinese government involvement in the U.S. political system. The draft copy of the report obtained by The Times does not include the closely held China section.

However, the section reportedly says there is strong circumstantial evidence that the government of China funded, directed or encouraged illegal contributions, and that the Chinese likely used intermediaries to funnel money into U.S. election campaigns.

Democrats, meanwhile, fired back with a draft report of their own pointing out Republican abuses. They accused former Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour of a “scheme” to funnel foreign money to the GOP through the nonprofit National Policy Forum and called his denials “not credible.”

Republicans concentrated their fire on Gore for his longtime relationship with Democratic fund-raiser John Huang and Arcadia immigration consultant Maria L. Hsia, the organizers of the Hsi Lai temple event.

The report says Hsia orchestrated an “elaborate system of donation-laundering” that resulted in the temple illegally reimbursing followers for at least $65,000 in contributions to the Democratic National Committee for the Gore event. It says this was only part of the more than $100,000 in laundered temple contributions arranged by Hsia and Huang during the 1996 campaign--part of a pattern Hsia initiated as early as 1993.

Nancy Luque, Hsia’s attorney, said: “Maria Hsia did not orchestrate any so-called reimbursement scheme. Ever.”

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Four separate chapters of the report are devoted to Huang, a Glendale resident who moved from the LippoBank of Los Angeles, owned by the Riady family of Indonesia, to the Commerce Department and then the Democratic National Committee following Clinton’s election in 1992.

During his 18-month stint at Commerce, Huang maintained frequent contact with the Lippo Group, the Jakarta-based conglomerate that was investing heavily in China. But Senate investigators said they found “no direct evidence” that Huang, who held a top-secret security clearance and had access to sensitive information, “passed any such information to his former employers or anyone else.”

Ty Cobb, Huang’s attorney, has denied that his client engaged in any illegal activity.

Also receiving attention in the report was Ted Sioeng, a wealthy Indonesian businessman some investigators suspect of being an agent of China, which his attorney has strongly denied.

- The Justice Department continues to investigate the fund-raising activities of Huang, Hsia, the Hsi Lai temple, Sioeng and others.

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Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.