THE SCANDAL OVER FOREIGN campaign donations to the Clinton campaign — to date, three shady contributions of “Asian money” — has broadened with amazing speed. Close Clinton associates are being accused not only of campaign finance fraud, but also of profiting off White House connections, politicizing the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and using the Commerce Department to drum up business for political allies domestic and foreign.
In September, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Korean electronics giant Cheong Am had disguised an illegal $ 250,000 contribution to the Democratic National Committee by claiming the money came from the company’s new American subsidiary. Only problem: The American subsidiary hadn’t generated the profits to cover the donation. To get the contribution, President Clinton consented to a one-on-one meeting with Cheong Am chairman James Lee. “There have been absolutely no violations of any law,” said Al Gore. Yet a month later, it was widely reported that Gore himself had taken part in a $ 140,000 fundraiser at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif. The fund-raiser was riddled with violations of law — including raising money at a religious event, disguising the identity of donors, and making donations through proxies.
But no story is richer in suspicious detail than the revelation last week that Indonesian “landscape architect” Arief Wiriadinata and his wife Soraya, who had been living for some months in northern Virginia, had personally donated $ 450,000 — more than all but a handful of American corporations — to the Democratic National Committee. There are no limits on the amount of money you can donate to a political party, nor are there restrictions on giving by legally resident aliens — but Wiriadinata had returned to Indonesia by the time most of his money was donated.
The Wiriadinatas are linked to Indonesia’s Lippo financial group, run by the multibillionaire Mochtar Riady and his son James. Soraya’s father was one of the group’s founders. Arief works for the Indonesian outlet of Sea World, owned by the Riadys. In the 1980s, the Riadys were part owners of the Worthen Bank, based in Hot Springs, Ark., and in 1985 they helped save Clinton from a catastrophic embarrassment. A $ 52 million lending scheme, involving a fly-by- night firm that went bankrupt, obliterated the Arkansas state pension fund. Worthen Bank issued tens of millions in new stock to refill the pension coffers.
John Huang, who met Bill Clinton as a Worthen intern in Arkansas in the 1970s and later became head of Lippo’s American bank operations, went to work as a deputy assistant secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration. Now an official at the Democratic National Committee, Huang arranged the Korean donation and the Wiriadinatas’ $ 450,000 donation.
As William Satire has reported, Lippo hired former Clinton Justice Department official Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm partner, shortly before Hubbell’s indictment on charges of bilking his clients. Lippo paid Hubbell $ 250,000 for a few weeks of never-specified work, in what may amount to a foreign-financed defense fund.
A host of Hubbell-like Arkansas cronies have a piece of the Lippo action. Joe Giroir, former managing partner of the Rose Law Firm, is a Lippo representative. Then there’s Clinton’s mysterious golf buddy, Mark Grobmyer. Grobmyer has worked with Riady and is now the principal in an Arkansas international trade firm called Commerce International. In recent years, Grobmyer has taken to traveling to Jakarta and other Asian capitals drumming up business. He reportedly solicits prospective clients by showing them a White House business card that lists him as a “liaison.”
The “liaison” post is presumably his job as White House liaison to the Center for the Study of the Presidency, a New York-based foundation that provides the White House with interns. According to the center, Grobmyer himself solicited the post. (In June 1993, at a dinner honoring Jay Rockefeller, Bob Dole, and Ron Brown, Lippo donated $ 30,000 to the center.)
Republicans, led by House government oversight chairman William Clinger, have asked for a record of all White House visits of both Riadys, Huang, and Grobmyer over the past months. What they’re wondering is: Is there an alliance between Clinton and the Riadys? Are foreigners buying influence in the federal government? Specifically, did these donations generate any quid pro quo?
They are focusing on the possibility that the Riadys are acting as go- betweens for Suharto and are trying to modify Clinton human-rights policy in the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. There’s a whiff of opportunism about the charge, and it’s not just because two longtime East Timor activists were recently given the Nobel peace prize. With some exceptions (Chris Smith and Bob Dornan in the House, Jesse Helms in the Senate), Republicans have never been overly exercised about East Timor. The Clinton administration, while its record on human rights in East Timor is not perfect, is restricting Indonesian access to instruments that could be used for torture and other human-rights abuses.
Yet Republicans think this scandal goes far beyond U.S. human-rights policy. They suspect specific tit-for-tat trade favors have been done for the Lippo group. During a Ron Brown trade mission to China shortly before his death, the Chinese awarded a billion-dollar hydroelectric-dam contract to the Louisiana company Entergy — financed by Lippo. Now, remember that Lippo is an Indonesian company. Using an American trade mission to drum up business for an Indonesian company is, to say the least, irregular and revives the question whether Ron Brown was using the Commerce Department as a sub rosa fund-raising operation, especially since similar charges had brought him to the brink of a criminal indictment by the time of his death. Former Commerce Department offcial John Huang’s career does nothing to allay the worry.
Republicans also want to know whether the Immigration and Naturalization Service was used to assist the Wiriadinatas into the country. Illinois representative Henry Hyde wrote attorney general Janet Reno last week to ask questions about Wiriadinata’s green card. Arief Wiriadinata was admitted on a P-47 non-immigrant visa, a category for fine arts and performing arts that generally doesn’t confer permanent residence or a green card. For a green card, he should have come in on an employment visa. As for Soraya Wiriadinata, who is hugely wealthy, there is no information whatsoever on her in INS computers, Republicans say.
Thus, the “Asian money” scandal brings together three of the biggest fears of the swing voters most courted by both parties: hard-to-control immigration, the global economy, and the sense that those who profit from it are buying control of the political system. Sen. John McCain has called for an independent counsel. Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold has seconded the call. The upshot would seem to be bipartisan hearings that could shine the light on Republican abuses as well.
That’s fine by McCain: “I’ve said for a long time that there would be an instance of flagrant abuse that would finally outrage the American people. And this is it.”
by Christopher Caldwell
