Tuesday, July 29
Jingle, jingle, jingle. I could hear him in the hallway outside the room where the Thompson hearings are held, and I knew at once: He was back. That’s what you hear when he’s around, louder sometimes than the high, reedy voice — jingle, jingle, jingle. Lanny Davis, the special White House counsel in charge of damage control, is a tightly wound man. He is never fully at rest. As he speaks, he rocks forward on the balls of his feet, as if he were peering over a hedge. When he holds a piece of paper, he rolls it into a tube and twists it, twists it, until it’s the circumference of a pencil. If he doesn’t have a piece of paper he digs deep into his pocket and grabs a clump of change, then releases it, over and over again. Jingle, jingle, jingle.
Lanny has been a fixture of the Thompson hearings from the first week, jingling and spinning, waiting outside the hearing room to tell reporters during breaks that they’ve heard all this before, it’s old news, why don’t you guys give the White House a fair shake, that’s all we’re asking, a little balance, is that too much to ask? Jingle, jingle. But I hadn’t seen him at all during the week of July 21. His defensive skills hadn’t been needed. Chairman Thompson had turned over three days of hearings to the Democrats, who used them to ventilate a sleazy foreign loan executed in 1994 by Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Today Lanny returned, and it was not a good day. As the hours wore on he assumed the look of a guy who had just returned from an idyllic vacation to find his house eaten up by termites and his son in bed with the Orkin man. I almost felt bad for him. Let me stress: almost.
This is a week devoted to Charlie Trie, the “Little Rock restaurateur,” as he has come to be known, who contributed $ 220,000 to the Democratic National Committee from 1994 to 1996, and raised an additional $ 400,000 for the lucky donkeys. Trie has now fled the country to China, and all of the money has since been returned, because it turns out — brace yourself — that Trie’s fund-raising techniques did not conform to certain conventions of Western society, like laws. An FBI agent testified this morning to lay out the garish particulars.
Trie befriended Bill Clinton years ago at his Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, when the future president was just a chow-mein-lovin’ governor from a place called Hope. When Clinton’s fondest hope was realized, Trie followed him to Washington and set himself up as a “consultant.” A more fitting job title would have been “loser.” During his years in Washington he never made more than $ 30,000. But the fact that he was nearly penniless did not inhibit his generosity, in return for which he was invited at least 23 times to the White House, including a visit with other DNC high rollers to the private residence, where he dined with the president.
How is this possible? The FBI agent discovered a series of wire transfers from Asia to Trie’s various bank accounts, totaling $ 1.4 million. And $ 905, 000 of this came from a single source, a Macao businessman named Ng Lap Seng – – known to associates, through some freakish transliteration, as Mr. Wu. Mr. Wu is, as his name implies, mysterious. Some have suggested he’s in the Chinese mafia, others that he’s a stooge for the Chinese government. Still others point out that the two possibilities are not at all mutually exclusive. In any case, Trie juggled Mr. Wu’s money from one account to the next, and then donated it to the DNC. The money-laundering scheme, as laid out by the FBI agent, was explicit, detailed, and irrefutable.
Even the committee’s Democrats were abashed, slightly. “Very disturbing,” said Sen. Durbin of Illinois, shaking his head. “Highly suspicious,” said Sen. Glenn, looking glum. The Republicans agreed. But what would Lanny say? When the hearing was over I rushed out to the hallway, where Lanny stood jingling.
“We will stipulate, as we have always stipulated, that there may have been certain people involved in these matters who might have crossed the line,” he said, rocking forward. “That’s for the record. But look: The American people have already read about Charlie Trie. They know all about Charlie Trie. What’s new here?”
Lanny’s back!
Wednesday, July 30
I stand corrected. Yesterday I wrote that Charlie Trie had “fled the country,” but today I saw a fax from Charlie’s Washington attorney. “Mr. Trie is not a fugitive from justice,” the attorney wrote. “He has recently been outside of the United States pursuing business opportunities.” Ah. He moves from triumph to triumph.
We got a fuller, even more colorful picture of him today. An essential episode in Trie lore tells of the half-million dollars that he tried to donate last spring to the Presidential Legal Expense Trust. He delivered the money — checks and sequentially numbered money orders — by hand, in large sacks. The trust, of course, is a defense fund, set up to help the president pay his many, many legal bills. Its board of trustees is a bipartisan group of men who have built highly distinguished careers sitting on boards: Elliott Richardson, John Brademas, Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, and perhaps the greatest board-sitter the world has ever known, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh. Experts note that there has never been a highly distinguished, bipartisan board upon which Father Hesburgh has not sat. The man must have splinters
As with all bipartisan boards, the trust’s director is a Democrat, Michael Cardozo. Cardozo has a fine reputation, and like so many decent people who have become entangled with the world of Bill Clinton, he finds himself for the first time in his career at the center of controversy. Imagine the scene. Here you are, a prominent Washington attorney, working without pay, proud to enhance your unblemished record by answering the president’s call to service. Yes, the job is an irritant, but he’s your president, and when the president asks something of you, etc. And then suddenly, one snoozy morning, into your office walks this . . . this Creature from the Little Rock Lagoon . . . this shady apparition from your president’s unknowable past . . . carrying envelopes stuffed with checks that he dumps out in wads on your conference table. “I am an old friend of the president,” he says . . . “a close friend” . . . and in that moment you learn more about your president than you ever wanted to know.
Cardozo remains loyal, however. He returned Trie’s donation, but went to great lengths to keep it out of the news. At one point, Trie even asked him to help market a line of Chinese-made inflatable toys. Again Cardozo demurred, but surely today he must wish he had never heard of Bill Clinton or Charlie Trie — or Father Hesburgh, for that matter. When he took the job in 1994, President Clinton was the most despised man in the country, and Cardozo probably reasoned that collecting donations to his legal defense fund would have kept him as busy as the Maytag repairman. But he underestimated his president, as so many have done. Now he spends his hours giving depositions, offering congressional testimony, producing documents, meeting with investigators, answering press queries . . . another public servant whose life has been touched by the Clinton magic.
Thursday, July 31
Today is the last day of hearings for several weeks; they’re scheduled to start up again in September. Much of the session was consumed in digressions. The first witnesses were Terry Lenzner and Loren Berger, private investigators hired by the trust to trace the source of Trie’s attempted donation. But that’s not what Republicans wanted to talk to them about.
Newsweek reported this week that an Oklahoma Indian tribe had met with Lenzner in May and asked him to dig up dirt on their senator, Don Nickles, who is also, perhaps by coincidence, a member of the committee. Lenzner was more than happy to oblige. For a fee of $ 17,000, Lenzner offered, among other things, to “conduct searches in appropriate online computer databases of Nickles, his wife Linda L. Morrison and two related companies.” The deal was never consummated, but the Newsweek story allowed the senators to launch themselves into flights of moral indignation, from which vantage they looked down in disgust upon this fallen world where people do opposition research on their political adversaries. To a man, they were shocked — repulsed — sickened by such conduct. “I don’t mind you messin’ with me,” Sen. Nickles drawled, “but I do mind you messin’ with my wife.” He sounded like Clint Eastwood. If only he didn’t look like Wally Cleaver.
Lenzner and Berger were far more interesting on the subject of Trie’s donations. It turns out that Charlie is a follower of a Vietnamese-born Buddhist nun called Supreme Master Ching Hai, whose globe-girding cult claims 100,000 followers. Many of their names wound up on the bogus checks and money orders offered to the president’s trust. For her part, Ching Hai favors sequined cocktail gowns and elaborate headdresses, and is often transported in a gaudy throne borne by her male courtiers. Her cultists have been known to drink her bath water “for its curative powers” (no ring around this tub!) and to buy her watercolor paintings for as much as $ 80,000. It gets weirder: They’re vegetarians.
Still, the ultimate source of the funds Charlie gave to the trust remains clouded in mist — like so much else in the committee’s work. But the plot has thickened considerably this week: We started out four weeks ago with John Huang, but now we’ve got a cult, bags of illicit money, untraceable wire transfers, inflatable toys, private investigators, unaccountable White House visits, a nun in a cocktail dress, Elliott Richardson, and the mysterious Mr. Wu. What a time for an intermission.
Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
