Gore’s Scandals

Yes, indeed: Thank you very much. The man in the video is Vice President Al Gore, a garland of flowers around his neck, acknowledging applause from a yellow-clad crowd of Buddhist nuns and monks. Who, by the end of the following day, though many of them are foreign nationals with hardly a penny to their names, will have written checks for nearly $ 100,000 to the Democratic National Committee. The nuns and monks will also have had these DNC “contributions” instantly reimbursed by their Hsi Lai Temple superiors. Who will have completed the secret transaction using a mixture of overseas funds and U.S. charitable donations. All of which will involve multiple violations of federal election law and the Internal Revenue Service code. Which violations will together constitute a felony: a criminal conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission.

Anyhow, back to the video, subsequently released as promotional material by the temple’s parent organization in Taiwan. Up the Hsi Lai steps walks Al Gore. Into a luncheon meeting hall he proceeds, where he takes a seat at the head table while the temple’s “venerable master,” Hsing Yun, addresses the faithful. Hsing Yun oversees a nearly half-billion-dollar global Buddhist empire. And Hsing Yun, he has elsewhere explained, likes to “spread the dharma” of Buddhist good cheer by giving lots of cash to American politicians. One of whom is next up on the tape. We see Al Gore speaking to the room. We see Gore exchanging gifts with the venerable master. We see Gore making his way out of the temple, bowing to his hosts, upright palms mashed together in Buddhist prayer the whole way. And then the tape is done, and . . .

Hold on a second. Hit the rewind button. Who’s that sitting next to the vice president at lunch — there, immediately to Gore’s left, the fellow with the mutton-chop side-burns? Why, it’s Ted Sioeng, that’s who. Sioeng is a citizen of Belize. He is also super rich, controlling a multinational stew of family-owned businesses, including several U.S. shell corporations and at least one “legitimate” enterprise: manufacture and distribution, under rights granted by Communist party officials in Beijing, of Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes, China’s state-owned brand.

Here at the Hsi Lai Temple event, Sioeng is just an honored guest. He’s gotten in free. But there’s a reason for that. Sioeng is a friend of the vice president, you see. They met at a White House breakfast back in February 1996, the morning after Sioeng bought his way into a DNC presidential dinner for $ 100,000. That contribution check was written by Sioeng’s daughter, Jessica, a legal resident of California. But Jessica’s bank account had less than $ 10,000 in it at the time. So the check had to be covered, a few days later, by a giant wire transfer from Hong Kong. The contribution from “Jessica” was illegal, in other words. As was most of the total $ 400,000 Sioeng and his family would give to the Democratic party for that year’s election.

And yet the DNC has never returned the money. And the Clinton Justice Department has never shown much interest in investigating it.

For more than three years now, the White House and its fund-raisers have steadfastly denied knowing, in 1996, that they were harvesting millions of dirty dollars like this. In particular, Vice President Gore has steadfastly denied contemporaneous knowledge that there was anything fishy about his Hsi Lai Temple fund-raiser. Or even that it was a fund-raiser. Gore was first introduced to Venerable Master Hsing Yun in 1989, during a trip he made to Taiwan in exchange for an explicit promise, from the now-notorious John Huang and Maria Hsia, that they would generate campaign contributions for his 1990 Senate race. Already by April 1996, donations laundered by Hsia through Hsing Yun’s Los Angeles monks and nuns had several times been funneled to the DNC — and had once helped grease a White House meeting between Gore’s staff and an intelligence operative from the People’s Republic of China. The Hsi Lai Temple was a well-known and frequent site for Democratic party fund-raisers. And everyone on Gore’s staff — and at the DNC — seems to have known, before-hand, that his own temple appearance would be yet another such cash-drenched affair. But the vice president himself had no idea. Not an inkling. So he says.

Now, you can’t see any money change hands in the four minutes of videotape that survives from April 29, 1996. Neither can you so much as hear mention of money. Because you can’t hear anything at all, really: just the marching band at the beginning, some eerie flute music at the end, and the anodyne Chinese narration throughout. Which vacuous sound track is itself highly suspicious, as it happens. King & I Productions, the Los Angeles film crew retained by the Hsi Lai Temple for Gore’s visit, recorded a full hour and a half of video and audio at the event: all the luncheon remarks, including the introduction Rep. Bob Matsui gave to the vice president. During which, according to witnesses who testified before Sen. Fred Thompson’s campaign finance investigation, Matsui bragged about how much money was being raised that day — and also announced that it was “okay to give contributions at the Hsi Lai Temple.” While Al Gore looked on.

The video and audio footage of Matsui’s little talk would prove Al Gore a baldfaced liar about his knowledge of a baldfaced crime, in other words. But that video and audio footage seems no longer to exist. Temple officials seem to have shipped it to Taiwan, where it has allegedly “disappeared.” And the Clinton Justice Department seems not to be looking for it. Justice abruptly shut down its Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s field investigation of the Hsi Lai Temple shortly after the controversy broke — just days before the 1996 election. Reassigned to Washington, that investigation has languished ever since. The FBI seems never to have interviewed Bob Matsui. About the temple fund-raiser, at least, the FBI seems never to have interviewed Al Gore.

Is there a familiar pattern here? There is. Consider the sequential responses of the vice president and his allies to questions about Gore’s infamous 1995-96 fund-raising phone calls from the White House. In March 1997, when news of those calls was first published, they were widely assumed to violate a federal ban on campaign solicitations in government offices. Gore, however, insisted that “no controlling legal authority” had forbidden his telephone work. And Attorney General Janet Reno declined to investigate, on the novel ground that federal workplace law barred only requests for donations to specific candidates and campaigns. What Gore had done — ask for nonspecific “soft money” to fund a general television campaign by the DNC — was perfectly okay, Reno announced.

Then, a few months later, it turned out that Gore’s phone calls had generated not just soft money but quite a lot of “hard” money, too, precisely the kind of solicitations that even Reno’s initial theory would have foreclosed. At a key White House meeting Gore attended in November 1995, a plan to have him make phone calls for such hard money had been discussed, and there were extant memos — addressed to him — that proved it. This time, Gore denied, to the FBI, ever having read the memos or remembering the meeting’s conversation: He thought he was later dialing for soft dollars only, whether or not it was actually true. And Janet Reno believed him. The vice president had no intent to break the law, so he hadn’t broken it, she decided. The Justice Department would not request appointment of an independent counsel.

Finally, in the summer of 1998, there surfaced hand-written notes taken by one of Gore’s aides at the November 1995 White House planning session. The notes made clear that hard-money contributions had explicitly been discussed in connection with the DNC’s television ad campaign, and that Gore had volunteered to make the necessary phone calls. What’s more, there were photographs of the meeting in which the vice president could clearly be seen peering intently at the memos he’d previously claimed never to have seen. Had Gore made false statements about all this to the FBI? Once again, Janet Reno sent the Bureau to question him. Once again, Gore proclaimed a total memory lapse about the relevant meeting and memos; maybe he had left the room to urinate when the subject of hard money came up, he offered.

And, once again, Janet Reno believed Al Gore. End of investigation.

But not end of story. For the story — of Gore’s phone calls and Hsi Lai Temple escapade — has a moral. And the moral is this: Al Gore is Bill Clinton all over. Confronted by a political threat, just as Clinton perceived one in the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky matters, Gore, like Clinton, is a man who feels entitled to cheat the law. And then, when he is caught cheating the law, Gore, just like Clinton, feels entitled to cheat the law some more — by lying about what he’s done. And by enlisting a hapless Justice Department in the dishonesty. “The public needed to be informed as to why this pending Republican agenda was not good for the country,” Gore told the FBI, thus rationalizing the DNC television ads his phone calls and Buddhist nuns helped make possible. What could be wrong with that?

Everything, actually. Al Gore’s sense of extralegal entitlement is a dangerous thing in a would-be president. His opponent in the forthcoming campaign, George W. Bush, may well try to make this case. There is no guarantee Bush will succeed. Eight years into the Clinton administration, the country’s concern for the integrity of its laws — at least as they apply to politics and politicians — has never seemed weaker. “Everybody does it,” Americans now routinely tell themselves, whistling past democracy’s graveyard.

But they are wrong about that. And there will be honor in any attempt to change their minds, even if the attempt is a practical failure. George W. Bush should speak out, early and often, about the true import of Al Gore’s grotesque campaign fund-raising scandals.

David Tell, for the Editors