MY HEARINGS, RIGHT OR HUANG

It doesn’t matter, though, for today word has come down: Under no circumstances am I to get bored. Nor am I to count how many civilians are waiting in line to attend the hearings, which I did last week. “There’s this impatience of reviewing the hearings as if it’s the latest Star Wars movie, and are people waiting in line, and so forth,” Bob Woodward announced on CNN’s Inside Politics this afternoon. “And I think people who have been shooting at it ought to be a little more patient.”

Even more chastening was this morning’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal. “It had slipped our notice that Congressional [hearings are] now mainly supposed to serve as bread and circuses for the local sophisticates,” said the Journal’s editors. “But if they’re having a hard time staying awake, maybe they should give the summer interns a chance to find the relevance.” The editorial followed a story in Sunday’s Washington Times: “Liberal media yawn at revelations in campaign-fund hearings.” As if in testimony to its own refusal to be bored, the Times’s lead story that morning — “Huang willing to talk under part immunity” — had already been its lead story five days earlier: “Huang offers Senate testimony under immunity.” A story that refuses to die!

Maybe I’ve just been overchastened, but it seemed to me that the pace of today’s hearings quickened considerably over last week’s. The Republicans have made several procedural adjustments, taking into account the obtuseness of heavy-lidded reporters. From now on, Chairman Thompson will open each hearing with a recap of the previous hearing — the way the narrator of The Green Hornet used to announce at the beginning of each episode: “Our story thus far . . .” Thompson and his colleagues have also dispensed with roundrobin questioning, so each witness suffers only one lead senatorial questioner. With luck this will eliminate much of the mind-numbing repetition we sat through last week. The way things are going I may not have to bring in my summer intern after all.

The best innovation is that, at the close of the hearing, a committee functionary rushes out with a singlepage summary of what just happened. This is especially helpful to reporters who tend to fall asleep (I noticed several of them last week). But nobody dozed today. The committee unveiled several delightful documents. One, from the Democratic National Committee, demonstrates how a Hong Kong rich guy named Eric Hotung wangled a meeting with the president’s national security adviser in exchange for a $ 100,000 soft-money donation. Others itemize the bonus of more than $ 500,000 that John Huang received from the Lippo Group, his former employers, before he went off to work at the Commerce Department. Several documents establish that Lippo shell companies made large contributions to the DNC, even though they were nearly bankrupt. The most explosive document, dated from 1992, shows John Huang explicitly requesting $ 50,000 from his bosses in Jakarta. “The funds are needed for: DNC Victory — Contribution,” Huang wrote.

“Here’s a clear trail of foreign money coming into U.S. elections,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman — typically, the only Democrat to make the admission. Reporters have pegged Lieberman as the man to watch. The other Democratic senators are pleased to cast themselves as defense attorneys, intent on controlling the damage and pricking each little balloon of evidence the Republicans manage to inflate. But Lieberman, self-consciously moderate, calm, and nonpartisan, wants to emerge as the Conscience of the Hearings, the Still Center of the Partisan Turmoil, the Diogenes who goes off in search of an honest man and finds him in the mirror. At a break this morning he went out to face the cameras and announced that intelligence information does indeed show a Chinese plan to funnel money in the ’96 elections — as Thompson had said last week, and as Democrats have been reluctant to admit. ” I wanted to make this statement in fairness to Sen. Thompson,” Lieberman said. Fairness? This is lonely territory he has staked out.
 
Wednesday, July 16

Sophisticates may complain that the hearings aren’t resulting in any revelations, but at lunch today, staring at my runny lump of tuna fish as it wobbled on its whole wheat bread, I had an epiphany of my own: Capitol Hill is a dump. I’m not referring to the lovely leafy row-house neighborhood that goes by the name, but to the actual physical institution where the nation’s business is transacted.

I don’t think most Americans appreciate this. But most Americans haven’t been up here for five of the last eight days, as I have, and most Americans haven’t been to the salad bar in the Dirksen Office Building cafeteria. Pineapple chunks in sugar sauce, lettuce scraps made of plastic, slimy cucumber slices, piles and piles of beets; any combination for $ 2.39 a pound. The tables are littered with sticky Coke cans and cellophane wrappers and crusts of bread. The tablecloths, which are meant to lend an imperial touch, are wadded up and stained and mysteriously damp. When the political worker bees go to the sundry shops to snag a candy bar, they find a store straight out of East Berlin a week before the Wall fell. Half the shelves are empty, and the rest are stocked according to socialist logic: fifteen cases of Mentos, one tube of toothpaste with the top unscrewed. Then the worker bees walk through hallways strewn like a battlefield with broken and upended furniture to their cubicles, where they work two or three people to a space, in service of a vain blowhard who will have an aneurysm if he doesn’t get that breakout on oil-refinery tax expenditures in time for his speech to the National Wholesalers.

No wonder everyone’s so cranky. They don’t want to be here any more than I do, and their solution is to make everyone else as miserable as they are. It’s working. The Republicans had a good day yesterday — their proof of Huang’s $ 50,000 illegal foreign donation from 1992 made all the front pages – – and so the Democrats, with the exception of Lieberman, were even surlier than usual. The bickering between Arlen Specter and John Glenn grew so heated at one point that Glenn said, “Look, Arlen . . .” This is how the Senate works. If you get really, really mad at somebody, you call him by his first name.

The Democrats continued their damage control. A pair of bureaucrats who gave Huang intelligence briefings at Commerce were called in to testify dramatically behind a translucent screen. They testified, somewhat undramatically, that Huang received classified information on China, though (unknown to them) he had no responsibilities in that area of policy.

Carl Levin’s climactic question was typically penetrating: “Did you ever see anything that would lead you to believe that Mr. Huang was passing secret information to China?” What were the bureaucrats supposed to say? “You bet! That’s why we told him all those secrets!” Instead they said no. And Sen. Levin took this as further proof that Huang wasn’t a security risk.

And of course Huang may not have been. But it began to emerge slowly today what he definitely was: an affirmative-action hire. Jeffrey Garten, who was Huang’s boss at Commerce, testified today that Huang was “walled off” from Chinese matters because “he was totally ineffective.”

Why was he hired then? “I think the major reason,” Garten said in his deposition, “was that Secretary [Ron] Brown was quite adamant that we have ethnic diversity . . . and I think at that time, we had no Asian Americans.”

The committee released Huang’s Commerce Department job appraisal, and it is a masterpiece of language inflation: “Mr. Huang managed and directed myriad of issues [sic] which cut across more than one region ensuring the effectiveness and timely execution of the International Economic Policy’s programs. . . . Mr. Huang leads IEP’s diversity group. He attended diversity and all other mandatory training in FY 1995 and required/ensured that all subordinate supervisors attended.” Give that man a raise!

After the hearings, the Republicans held a background briefing for reporters in a hearing room in the Dirksen building. The room has a towering ceiling and is dimly lit, lending an air of mystery to the proceedings. Deep Throat would feel right at home. The briefing is another of this week’s innovations — to fix in everyone’s mind the story line the committee is trying to lay out. Incredibly, however, even on background, the lawyers refuse to acknowledge they have a story line to lay out.

“As I have told you and told you,” said one counsel, “there is no grand theory we’re trying to establish. This is an eight-week effort to look at the process.”

But this is ludicrous on its face. From the millions of pages of subpoenaed documents and dozens of depositions, the committee’s Republicans have carefully selected a set of facts to present in public: John Huang raised illegal funds; he worked for a foreign conglomerate, Lippo, many of whose operations are half-owned by the Chinese government; he was hired at Commerce at the suggestion of a Lippo consultant; he specifically requested intelligence briefings on China that he was not supposed to get; he made apparently unauthorized visits to the Chinese Embassy; he had unusual access to the White House and the president; he used a private office across the street from Commerce, where he quietly received faxes, Federal Express packages, and phone calls; the White House then pressured the DNC to hire him, after which he continued to raise illegal funds, perhaps Chinese in origin. And all of this has been presented after Thompson declared dramatically that a Chinese plan existed to interfere in the American political process.

“There is no grand conspiracy theory we’re pushing,” the counsel repeated. ” If there’s a theory, it’s in your minds, not ours.”

We sophisticates may be easily bored, but we’re not stupid. Well, not all of us.
 
Thursday, July 17

The evolution of scandal in the Clinton era, as a sociological phenomenon, continues to dazzle. To wit: A few weeks ago, Clinton defenders gleefully released evidence that Paula Jones had once bragged about her hotel-room encounter with then-Governor Clinton. “Sure he nailed her,” they seemed to be saying, “and she loved it.” In the funhouse world of Clinton scandals, this is taken to be exculpatory.

I thought of this after this morning’s hearing, where we heard about the more than 60 visits John Huang made to the White House as a low-ranking Commerce official, sometimes to see Clinton in the White House residence. As we filed out, a DNC operative cheerfully handed us a stack of news clips and a printout from Lexis-Nexis. “At least 53 articles discuss the ties between John Huang and the White House,” said the printout. It indeed seemed exhaustive, even citing articles from “Ethnic NewsWatch, Filipino Express.”

This is how far we’ve come: The Clintonites are now passing around clips damaging to their own case to convince reporters that they have nothing to write about, because all the bad stuff is old news. The DNC is proceeding on the central thesis of Clinton-era scandals: If it’s been in the paper, it can’t be bad.

No one should be surprised, then, that the press is confused. Consider two ledes from this morning’s papers.

“Testifying behind a screen to shield his appearance,” the Los Angeles Times wrote, “a CIA agent told Senate investigators Wednesday that he shared classified information with former Commerce Department official John Huang, not knowing that a higher-up considered Huang ‘totally unqualified’ to handle sensitive foreign trade issues. . . . In the end, the witnesses merely heightened the mystery. . . .”

Now this from the New York Times: “Screened from public view, an official of the CIA today told the Senate committee examining campaign finance abuses that briefings for John Huang on classified information about Asia had been part of routine procedure at the Commerce Department and had not been sought by Mr. Huang. . . . ‘I am assuming he used the information properly,’ [the CIA official] said.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on the New Yorkers, since the Angelenos have beaten them in this story at every turn of events — and the L.A. Times continues to offer, day by day, the best coverage of the hearings. But it’s worth noting that, in their lede, the New Yorkers deliberately set out not to excite reader interest in the story but to deflect it — a curious news judgment, given the incendiary possibilities. And the snooziness of the New York Times’s coverage is reflected by the networks, who slavishly take their cues from the appropriately named Gray Lady. Two of the three network newscasts haven’t even mentioned the hearings for two days.

Of course, there are times when I can’t blame them. This afternoon, the hearings threatened (cliche ahead) to break down amid partisan bickering. (Do you think I could get a job at the New York Times?) The Republicans brought out one of their own to testify, a young committee lawyer named John Cobb. He had prepared a series of charts, which were blown up and presented on easels. They had bold-faced titles: “Huang’s Access to Classified Information While At Commerce,” for example, and several that said: “Huang Fundraising at Commerce?” The sinister implication was unmistakable, but under intense examination by the Democrats, young Cobb denied that there was any implication at all.

“Is it your testimony under oath,” thundered Levin, “that there was no intention to create a particularly impression with these charts?”

It is customary, according to the Senate’s centurieslong tradition of gentility, for a senator to humiliate a staffer only behind closed doors. But Levin was understandably incredulous. The Republicans can’t long maintain that they’re not building a circumstantial case against John Huang, even as they quite publicly build a circumstantial case against John Huang. The charts were insulting in another way, too. With their large graphics of telephones and piles of cash, they looked as though they had been designed by the same fellow who puts smiley-face suns and frowning rainclouds on TV weathermaps. Political operatives often assume reporters are stupid — sometimes a safe enough assumption — but if reporters think you think they’re stupid, they will never forgive you. And the charts insulted the intelligence of journalists as a class. Imagine something that could insult the intelligence of Diane Sawyer.

Then the partisan bickering began in earnest, as the committee decided whether to grant immunity for a series of potential witnesses. My notes from this point on are just doodles. At last the committee went into executive session to yell at each other in private. Outside the hearing room, the ever- reliable Lanny Davis, the White House special counsel, was handing out copies of an editorial from Roll Call, a Capitol Hill paper. He raised one above his head like a corner newsboy and called out, “What about Congress? What about those fund-raising scandals? When is Senator Thompson going to look at Congress?” But none of the reporters appeared terribly interested. We’d seen enough of Congress for the week.

By Andrew Ferguson; Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD