Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- May 19, 1998
The faint first cracks
in the body armorby Wesley Pruden
We've found the smoking gun. (The steaming egg roll, if you like.)
President Clinton, whose blind partisans doggedly insist there's nothing any more suspicious about this than any of the other score or so Clinton scandals and none are scandalous, has to be feeling a little queasy.
When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Joe Biden and Tom Daschle raise a collective eyebrow on a single day, the president has to feel a sudden chill in the wind blowing in across the Atlantic.
Johnny Chung, the California businessman and Democratic bag man, expressed his fund-raising philosophy with Oriental directness. The hundreds of thousands of dollars he passed on from the government in Beijing, he said, were spent as "subway tokens" for himself and his Chinese friends to buy entry into the White House, where Bill Clinton cheerfully stood by while the visitors picked up everything that wasn't nailed down, and a few things that were. Only inscrutable Occidentals, all 270 million of us, have been unable to recognize what they were doing.
What we know so far is that Mr. Chung took $300,000 from a Chinese aerospace official, Liu Chao-ying, a lieutenant colonel in the People's Liberation Army designated by the Beijing government to give at the office. Mr. Chung passed $100,000 of that sum on to the Democratic National Committee, and kept the rest as a sort of service charge, or handling fee. There may have been lots more.
Janet Reno's G-men are believed to have on tape intercepts of conversations in which Mr. Chung and his clients in Beijing discuss the plan for buying Bill Clinton. This is what Fred Thompson and his Senate committee were after last fall, and never got.
The three Democratic senators are the first to break ranks with the administration, and they choose their words carefully. But it's clear that they've got cramps in their fingers from holding their noses, and the stink is getting worse by the hour. If it becomes impossible to keep Mr. Clinton propped up as a president just credible enough to survive -- this has been the Democratic strategy since mid-winter -- nobody wants to be the last one out of the pig sty.
Nobody knows where the Chinese money will lead, though it looks like the path will go through the Loral Corp., which two years ago obtained a presidential waiver to export advanced satellite technology to Beijing. At that time, Loral was under criminal investigation for an earlier export of such technology to China. Bernard Schwartz, chairman of Loral, is one of the most generous Democratic contributors. You could add it up.
The brazen seediness of this scheme, specifically forbidden by U.S. law, defies credulity. Only a country boy confident of taking the pants off the city slickers would even attempt it. There's no denying that the bag man was collecting hot money wherever he could; Mr. Chung pleaded guilty in March to making illegal donations. He told prosecutors that Liu Chao-ying, whose employer is a company owned by the Chinese government, told him that the money came from Chinese intelligence sources and was meant for political contributions.
Miss Liu's father is Gen. Liu Huaqing, once a member of the Communist Party leadership and once the top Chinese military commander.
Naturally, the Democrats know nothing -- they know nossing! -- about the source of the contributions. Why should they? Bag men are famously altruistic, and just because Johnny Chung slopped around nearly half a million dollars, like mayonnaise on an egg-salad sandwich, there was no reason to think he would have wanted his clients to get credit for it. It was only money.
"This money has not been at the DNC for almost a year," party spokesman Rick Hess insists. "We returned every penny. We had no way of knowing this money came from overseas."
Richard Sullivan, who was the finance director for the party, seems to have been the only man over there who knows how babies are made. He told investigators for the Senate Government Affairs Committee that he was concerned about Mr. Chung's sources. "I had a sense that he might be taking money from them and then giving it to us." What a sensible fellow.
Only someone who has been asleep for the past decade would not have seen this coming. This is exactly how Bill Clinton turned Arkansas into a private satrapy, drying up the sources of political money by taking it all for himself. Raising money is what the president does best. It's all he ever wanted to do. He has never cared where the money comes from, or what he gives in return. It's a mad, mad, mad world out there, studded with peril, and 42 presidents before him worried themselves sick about it. But it's a world that just never occurred to Bill Clinton.Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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