Clinton Releases Justice Dept. Interview

President Clinton on Monday followed Vice President Al Gore’s lead and voluntarily released a transcript of his April interview with Justice Department investigators probing campaign fund-raising controversies.

In a lengthy and occasionally contentious session, the investigators grilled Clinton about his relationship with the Riady family of Indonesia, quizzing him about what the family may have gotten in exchange for its largess to Clinton’s political campaigns. And they pressed him about what he knew of the family’s large payments to former Clinton friend Webster L. Hubbell after he left the Justice Department under an ethical cloud in 1994.

Clinton said the Riadys--an Indonesian family that controls the influential Lippo Group and contributed heavily to Clinton’s presidential campaigns and the Democratic Party in 1992 and 1996--never sought special treatment, and instead only pushed generically for closer U.S. relations with China.

Robert J. Conrad Jr., head of the Justice Department’s campaign finance task force, pressed the president repeatedly on details of his dealings with the Riady family dating to Arkansas in the early 1980s and during the first term of his presidency. Clinton frequently said he could not answer, citing failed or sketchy memories.

But at one point, Clinton turned sharply on Conrad when the investigator asked whether he bore some responsibility for millions of dollars in illegal contributions to the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 campaign.

“The two people most responsible for it were the two people that were in that position because of their relationship to you,” Conrad said, apparently referring to Democratic fund-raisers John Huang and Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie. “Would you agree with that?”

Clinton retorted: “Is this guilt by association, sir? What do you want me to say?”

Mochtar Riady, and his son, James T. Riady, who knew Clinton from his time working at a Little Rock, Ark., bank in the mid-1980s, became central figures in the 1996 campaign fund-raising controversy because they apparently helped direct questionable contributions to the DNC.

One of the more arresting passages of the transcript concerns not fund-raising, but the administration’s failed effort to evict the Branch Davidians from their compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993. The incident came up in questioning because James Riady visited the White House the day the compound burned.

Clinton, in remarks more blunt than any he has made publicly, said he had disagreed with the Justice Department raid. “I gave in to the people in the Justice Department who were pleading to go in early, and I felt personally responsible for what happened, and I still do,” he said. “I made a terrible mistake.”

Conrad pressed Clinton on why the Riadys, in particular James, seemed so eager to help him in 1992, pledging $1 million for his campaign. Clinton said he did not remember the Aug. 14 conversation when that pledge allegedly took place--”If he said that, I’m surprised I don’t remember it”--but said he was not surprised the family was trying to revive an old Arkansas relationship.