Did The U.S. President Auction Off U.S. Foreign Policy?
You probably haven't heard much about the Clinton financial scandals recently. The U.S. media aren't interested -- the story is complicated, it's vacation season, and besides, the only scandals they care about involve Republicans.
But all of that may at last be about to change. Thanks to the FBI and the Senate investigative committee, the complicated Clinton campaign finance story is this month becoming very simple. What it comes down to is this: Did the president of the United States auction off U.S. foreign policy to the highest bidder?
Throw your mind back to early 1995. President Bill Clinton has just suffered a humiliating defeat in the 1994 congressional elections. He is terrified he will lose in 1996. His campaign adviser, Dick Morris, comes to him with a plan to save his job by putting television advertising on the air earlier than ever before, 18 months before the next election. The problem is, Morris's plan will cost hundreds of millions of dollars -- more than anybody has ever spent on the presidency -- and the Democratic party is broke.
That's when the president and Al Gore and the First Lady started making their notorious phone calls to every Hollywood executive and rich liberal in the U.S. That's when the Lincoln Bedroom is turned into a Motel 6. That's when the shady international businessmen and the convicted drug dealers begin showing up at White House functions. But even this was not enough.
So the president brought in an old acquaintance: John Huang. When the Huang story broke, the president insisted he barely knew who the man was, and had no idea how he had come to work for his re-election campaign. However, internal White House documents show the president personally ordered the hiring of John Huang -- first as an official in the commerce department, and then as a Democratic National Committee fundraiser.
Huang had been an employee of the Lippo Group. Lippo is an Indonesian company, owned by an extremely wealthy Chinese family named Riady. Lippo had bought an important Arkansas bank in
1984, and that is when Huang and Clinton came to know each other. Through Huang, in turn, Clinton came to know some other interesting people: The Riadys are large investors in China and have intimate business relations with the Chinese military and the Chinese government.
At the Commerce Department and then at the DNC, Huang was clearly something more than an ordinary employee. He repeatedly received secret intelligence briefings. Phone logs show he received
several calls from the Chinese embassy in Washington. And for no reason that anybody can figure out, he visited that embassy at least six times. Nor was it ever fully clear whom Huang was working for. He received a nearly $ 1-million gift on his departure from Lippo.
In 1995 and '96, Huang raised millions of dollars for the DNC. Many of the donations came from people who manifestly could not afford to make them. But not to worry: They would within days or weeks receive wire transfers from China reimbursing them.
It looks, in other words, as if Huang were co-ordinating a scheme to route money from China to Clinton -- and that Clinton knew it. What makes this all the more alarming was that this immense flow of money was occurring at precisely the same moment the U.S. and China were toughing out the worst crisis in their relations since the Vietnam War. Nineteen ninety-five was the year of Taiwan's
first free presidential elections. The Chinese were determined to overawe the Taiwanese, and began "testing" missiles off the Taiwanese coast and muttering threats about invasion. After some delay, the U.S. government ordered the Seventh Fleet to the area. And all the while, the president of the U.S. appears to have been pocketing money from the potential enemy his fleet was
confronting.
Some cynics might say: so what? In the end, the president did the right thing. He did back Taiwan. And yes, that's true. But you have to wonder -- would the Chinese have dared behave as they did if they did not know they held a powerful secret about the president? Clinton may believe he didn't sell himself. But the Chinese seem to be holding a substantial receipt.
Clinton's critics have in the past compared his scandals to those of Richard Nixon. They are now looking far more grave even than that.
Originally published in The Financial Post