Clinton campaign recidivist

R. Emmett Tyrrell:

...

In 1998 the Senate Government Affairs Committee report on the Clintons' 1996 fundraising scandal claimed "strong circumstantial evidence" that the Riadys may have illegally funneled money into the 1996 campaign. Whether they did or not, that 1996 campaign abounded with dubious Asian donors, many of whom paid hefty fines for illegal contributions. Former Democratic National Committee finance chair John Huang pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance violations after the Justice Department estimated that he arranged for some $156,000 in illegal contributions to his party. Just to be safe, the party returned more than $1 million. Pauline Kanchanalak, a Thai businesswoman, admitted to making $690,000 in illegal contributions to the Democrats, $457,000 after a June 18, 1996, coffee at the White House with President Clinton. Charlie Trie, a former fry cook from Little Rock, was convicted of federal campaign finance violations after he donated nearly $300,000 to the Democrats in the mid-1990s and personally delivered at least $640,000 in questionable checks and money orders to the Clintons' legal defense. Taiwan-born Maria Hsia, a friend of Al Gore since 1988, was convicted of arranging more than $100,000 of illegal donations to the Democratic Party during the 1996 presidential cycle from a Buddhist temple.

And there is more. Johnny Chung pleaded guilty to numerous felonies committed during that race. He donated $366,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $35,000 of which he admitted came from Lt. Col. Liu Chaoying of the People's Liberation Army. In May, 1999, Chung testified before the U.S. House of Representatives that Liu introduced him to Gen. Ji Shengde, head of Chinese military intelligence, who told him, "We like your president very much. We would like to see him reelect [sic]. I will give you 300,000 U.S. dollars. You can give it to the president and the Democratic Party." Perhaps one of the reasons the Clintons can dismiss so many of the scandals in their wake as "old stories" is that the Clintons are what law-enforcement officials call "repeat offenders." But I am perplexed as to why the mainstream media do not catch on. The Hsu stories in the press reported that he is a "textile executive." From what my reporters have been able to discover, his textile concerns have no offices and no legitimate addresses. Philip Klein found that one of the addresses for Hsu's campaign finance filings is the site of the Mid-Manhattan Public Library. Put another way, this major Democratic donor seems to have had no visible means of support. Now he is a missing person.

It is interesting that in the election news stories talking about how much more Democrats were raising this cycle than Republicans the media went with the Democrat spin rather than checking the source of that funding. Even the discovery of Hsu was almost accidental when the Wall Street Journal raised questions about a family, that Hsu had claimed had donated money, that appeared to be beyond their means. This led to a cascading crash of Hsu's house of cards with the discovery of his bogus addresses and his flight to avoid jail time for a fraud conviction.

Will this lead to more curiousness about other Democrat donors? Probably not. It should lead to an FBI investigation of Hso's source of funds as well as that of his bundled contributors. This should be a fairly straight forward examination of banking records showing money going into an account which is used to make the donation. Where the money comes from can be traced all the way to China if necessary.

While some of the candidates have donated funds to match Hsu's direct contributions, there is no record yet that they have disgorged the bundled donations that are probably even more suspect that the direct ones. Suddenly the Democrat funding advantage is not looking so spiffy.