1997 Special Investigation in Connection with 1996 Federal Election Campaigns
At a fundraising lunch held on April 29, 1996 at the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California, and attended by Vice President Gore, Buddhist monastics illegally funneled $65,000 to the DNC through “straw donors” at the instigation of Hsia, a longtime fundraiser for the Vice President. When press accounts of this donation-laundering appeared, Temple officials altered and destroyed evidence to protect the Temple, Hsia, and the Vice President from embarrassment.
Despite his repeated, albeit inconsistent, denials, it is reasonable to conclude that the Vice President was well aware that the Temple event was for the purpose of raising money. The event was organized by Huang and Hsia, who had longstanding relationships with Vice President Gore that revolved almost entirely around campaign fundraising. More specifically, in the weeks prior to his Temple visit, Vice President Gore was repeatedly reminded that the April 29 luncheon was a fundraiser and was even meticulously informed by Ickes of the DNC’s “projected revenue” for the event. The Vice President received the last of these notifications of the April 29 lunch’s “projected revenue” only 24 hours before he received his briefing notes for the Temple lunch.
The Vice President’s staff also knew that the Temple event was a fundraiser. In March 1996, Deputy Chief of Staff David Strauss had helped arrange a meeting in the White House with the head of the Temple, Master Hsing Yun—a meeting which Strauss believed would “lead to a lot of $.” The White House staff repeatedly referred to the event as a “fundraiser” in internal correspondence, and assigned to it a “ticket price” of “1000–5000 [dollars per] head.”
The Temple fundraiser was merely the most egregious episode in a longstanding pattern of illegal donation-laundering by Hsia and the Hsi Lai Temple that stretched back at least to 1993. In that year, Hsia and Huang apparently collaborated in laundering $50,000 to the DNC from the Hsi Lai Temple and from Lippo Group sources overseas in connection with a meeting between Vice President Gore’s chief of staff and the chairman of China Resources, a company linked in press reports to Chinese intelligence. From 1993 until the general elections of 1996, over $140,000 in Temple money was illegally funneled to Democratic candidates at Hsia’s direction.
This pattern of donation-laundering in 1993–96 derived from a broader relationship between Hsia, Huang, and Vice President Gore that began in 1988 when Hsia, Huang, and Riady organized a trip to Taiwan for then-Senator Gore. Hsia thereafter became a significant fundraiser for the Senator. As early as 1989, her fundraising efforts for him involved both monastics from the Hsi Lai Temple and the illegal “tallying” of contributions through the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (“DSCC”).
Charlie Trie
Trie first met the President in the late 1970's when he owned and operated a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock. After Clinton’s election in 1992, Trie sold his restaurant and opened Daihatsu International Trading Company in Washington, D.C. Soon thereafter, Trie and his wife contributed large sums to the DNC, and by 1994 he had become a DNC “Managing Trustee”—a title reserved for the highest level of party contributor. From 1994 to 1996, Trie contributed or raised approximately $645,000 for the DNC. In 1994, he contributed $100,000 to the DNC while earning only approximately $30,000 as president of Daihatsu. Nor could his firm Daihatsu have made up the difference: throughout this period, it never made any profit.
In reality, most of Trie’s money came from his Asian business partner, Ng Lap Seng, a hotel tycoon in Macao with reputed links to organized crime who advises the Chinese government.4 Ng transferred approximately $1.4 million to Trie from 1994 to 1996, with many of these transfers arriving through the Bank of China. Sometimes Trie contributed Ng’s money directly to the DNC in his own name. In other instances, he laundered donations through other Asian-Americans. Two of these “straw donors” made donations to the DNC so that Ng could attend a White House function. Accordingly, they donated a total of $25,000 to the DNC and were reimbursed with money from Ng’s account.
In addition to being a major fundraiser and close friend of the President, Trie visited the White House 31 times in 1994 and 1995 alone. Intriguingly, Ng, who had no ties to the President except through Trie, also visited the White House 10 times between June 1994 and October 1996. In one of the more egregious examples of its dilatory document production, however, the White House did not reveal Ng’s still-unexplained visits until just hours after the conclusion of the Committee’s public hearing on the activities of Trie and Ng.5
Trie’s fundraising efforts won him numerous White House favors, including a Presidential appointment to the Commission on U.S. Pacific Trade and Investment Policy—an act requiring a new Executive Order to expand the size of the Commission. In February 1996, assisted by a $50,000 donation from his business partner Ernest G. Green, Trie arranged admission to a White House coffee for Wang Jun, a Chinese arms dealer and advisor to the Chinese government. Despite his connections to a major Chinese armaments firm whose plans to smuggle automatic weapons into the U.S. the Customs Service even then was investigating, Wang was not vetted by the National Security Council (“NSC”) and was admitted to the White House only on the strength of his relationship with Trie and Green.
In March 1996, Trie wrote to the President on how to handle U.S.-China relations, which were then tense. This letter was faxed to the White House on the same day that Trie delivered almost $500,000 to the Presidential Legal Expense Trust (“PLET”). The Committee has been unable to determine whether Trie wrote this letter on his own or on behalf of foreign interests. Trie received a reply from the President prepared by NSC staff and personally reviewed by National Security Advisor Tony Lake.
Trie also set about to help the President and First Lady defray the considerable personal legal expenses they had accrued in fending off previous scandals. To this end, Trie raised in excess of $700,000 from a controversial Buddhist sect devoted to a woman named Ching Hai, and conveyed this money to the PLET.
The PLET, however, became suspicious about the source of Trie’s funds. With White House approval, the PLET’s executive director, Michael Cardozo, hired an investigative firm that determined that the money had been coerced from or laundered through members of the Ching Hai sect. Nevertheless, soon after, Trie sat next to the President at the head table of a $5,000 per person fundraising dinner.
By June 1996, the PLET decided to return Trie’s donations. Rather than publicly reporting his contributions under its regular practice, the PLET hid the fact that Trie had ever given money to it. Moreover, the White House knew and approved of this decision. Despite Ickes’ and Lindsey’s knowledge of Trie’s suspicious fundraising, neither warned the DNC. As a result, while the PLET returned his donations, Trie’s illegal contributions to the DNC continued; Trie delivered $110,000 to the DNC in August 1996 in honor of the President’s 50th birthday.
Both the DNC and the White House claimed complete surprise that Huang and Trie raised substantial amounts of foreign money. It strains credulity, however, to suggest that these men could surreptitiously raise over $2.2 million for the DNC—much of it from foreign donors at major DNC events the President attended—without anyone suspecting the truth.
The White House and the Presidency Itself Became Fundraising Tools
The White-House inspired DNC drive for new sources of campaign cash caused more than just an unprecedented influx of foreign money into the 1996 campaign. More broadly, it debased the White House and the Presidency itself by employing both in constant efforts to raise money. Extensive DNC fundraising occurred because the President and his advisors, including Dick Morris, decided that the party’s massive advertising campaign would cost more than could possibly be provided by the “hard” money in the President’s