In mid-1995, the President and his strategists decided that they needed to raise and spend many millions of dollars over and above the permissible limits of the Presidential campaign funding law if the President was going to be reelected. They devised a legal theory to support their needs and proceeded to raise and spend $44 million in excess of the Presidential campaign spending limits.
The lengths to which the Clinton/Gore campaign and the White House-controlled Democratic National Committee were willing to go in order to raise this amount of money is essentially the story of the 1996 Presidential campaign scandal. The President and his aides demeaned the offices of the President and Vice President, took advantage of minority groups, pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well. Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions, much of it from foreign sources. When these abuses were discovered, the result was numerous Fifth Amendment claims, flights from the country, and stonewalling from the White House and the DNC.
Over a brief period of three months of hearings, the Committee was able to fulfill its responsibility in laying out the available facts to the American people. A much clearer picture of what happened during the 1996 Presidential campaign has been developed and presented.
However, many questions remain unanswered. It is now the responsibility of the Attorney General or, more appropriately, an independent counsel to take these facts and aggressively pursue any and all indications of criminal wrong-doing. Indeed, the three most important legal developments to come out of the 1996 campaign finance scandal are all attributable to the investigation conducted by the Committee on Governmental Affairs. First, Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie, an associate of the President, has been indicted for, among other things, obstruction of the Committee’s investigation. Second, Maria Hsia, a prominent Democratic fundraiser, has been indicted for laundering campaign contributions that were a focus of the Committee’s inquiry. Finally, the Attorney General has requested appointment of an independent counsel to determine whether Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt lied to the committee.
Despite the delaying tactics of the White House and DNC, the Committee developed a great deal of information in a relatively short period of time. Large numbers of documents had been received from many sources, and depositions and interviews were being conducted. In addition, on June 6, 1997, three members of the majority staff, two detailed FBI agents, and one member of the minority staff undertook an investigative trip to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, and Indonesia to collect information and interview witnesses.
They succeeded in giving the American people a boat load of information that would normally never have become public in the absence of the Committee’s investigation. It was not always the Committee itself that released the information, but it was the Committee that was responsible for the release of it. Example; the White House released allot of information to the media before giving it to the Committee. None of that would have been publicly disclosed without the Committee’s demands for the information from the White House. Giving clearance to the public’s right to know, more than offering assuptions and conjectures and /or reaching any political heights, was really the job of the special investigation, and the Committee if they succeeded in satisfying this first purpose.
A second reason for the inquiry and hearings was to fully lay out the operation of the current framework for Federal elections. For Congress to legislate and govern effectively, it must conduct routine oversight to learn how the government is functioning. Congress also has a responsibility to examine the operation of current laws on the government and private parties. This Committee is particularly well-suited to conduct such a broad oversight inquiry into the multifarious elements of this scandal because it has the broadest oversight jurisdiction in the Senate: “to study or investigate the efficiency and economy of operations of all branches of the Government.”
When the 105th Congress convened in early January 1997, Senator Fred Thompson (RTN) was confirmed as the chairman of the Committee. On January 7, 1997, Chairman Thompson named Hannah Sistare as staff director of the Committee and hired Michael J. Madigan, a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, to serve as chief counsel for the special investigation into campaign fundraising abuses in the 1996 elections. Senator John Glenn (D-OH) was selected as the ranking minority member of the Committee, and he named former Senate Legal Counsel Michael Davidson to serve as minority chief counsel for the special investigation.
Of perhaps equal importance to the information the Committee was gathering, however, was the information the Committee was unable to obtain. Thirty-five witnesses with information relevant to the Committee’s investigation asserted the Fifth Amendment right against selfincrimination and refused to testify and/or produce documents in response to a Committee subpoena. In late June, the Committee began considering whether to grant immunity to some of the witnesses who had invoked their Fifth Amendment right. On June 27, the Committee voted to confer immunity on four witnesses. On July 23, the Committee voted to immunize another five witnesses. Thus, the Committee voted to immunize nine witnesses, five of whom eventually testified in open session during the Committee’s hearings. An additional ten potential witnesses fled the country and were beyond the Committee’s ability to issue legal process. The Committee was unable to contact any of these individuals during the staff’s foreign trip. While the Committee was able to interview a number of foreign witnesses during that trip, 12 potential foreign witnesses who were contacted refused requests for interviews, among whom were some of the most important, including James Riady and Ng Lap Seng.
Now, while this all sounds like the plot to an epesode to an old Roky and Bulwikle with agents being put into the back of a black car and shuffled off in hopes of finding the key to the Upsadaisium mind only to find that their plans are spoiled by “Moose und Squirle” even when mines go off from nearby hhsshhaboomerum, it isn’t it is a very real investigation with very real people that have commotied crimes. They just want you to think it’s not real and that what they did was funny in some way; well I’m not laughing and you shouldn’t either.
So if you’re courious yourself and want to look into this, please do so. In the meanwhile I plan to keep you abreast of the sitsuation as it comes up in this blog. I will post more as I come across it and I wont hold anything back.
By the way, at the top I have writen an address for you to contact the Whitehouse. Do so and contact someone and demand that something still be done. I did.
That’s The lazlo Report for March 6, 2007
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