CHINAGATE: UNFINISHED BUSINESS
FBI agents claim
DOJ fixed probe
Reno, aides worked 'hand and glove' with White House to protect Clinton
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Editor's note: This is one in a series of exclusive WorldNetDaily investigative reports on the Justice Department's still-active criminal probe of 1996 Clinton-gore fund-raising abuses.
By Paul Sperry
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- The day after the Thompson committee hearings on Chinagate kicked off in the Senate, a lawyer driving a white Lexus pulled up to Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie's home in Little Rock, Ark.
It was July 2, 1997, and FBI agents conducting surveillance on Trie's house watched, powerlessly, as Trie's secretary, Maria "Dia" Mapili, and the lawyer loaded the car with four boxes, which agents later confirmed contained documents under subpoena by both a federal grand jury and the Senate.
Earlier that day, agents thought they had a green light to search Trie's home to stop the further destruction of evidence that they'd discovered while sifting through Trie's garbage cans.
Mixed in with fish heads and other garbage were bits of key records that investigators had sought in their criminal probe of 1996 Clinton-Gore fund-raising abuses.
After drying out and piecing together the shreds of paper, they restored checks from Asian donors to President Clinton's legal defense fund, Democratic National Committee donor lists, travel records for Chinese money men and statements from Chinese bank accounts. There also was a FedEx slip showing the White House had sent two pounds of documents to Trie just two months earlier.
But, at the last minute, Justice officials denied their request for a search warrant. In fact, FBI special agent Kevin Sheridan was back in Washington arguing against the high-level punt at the same time Mapili and her lawyer, who'd been tipped off to the scheduled search that day, were carting off documents.
Scrambling to recover the documents, special FBI agent Daniel Wehr asked for permission to stop the Lexus as it sped off. Justice officials turned that request down, too.
Agents learned later that Mapili, who had no prior counsel, had quickly and conveniently lawyered up with one of Arkansas' best -- W.H. Taylor, who is Don Tyson's personal lawyer. Tyson, the chicken king who heads Fayetteville, Ark.-based Tyson Foods, is a big Clinton supporter.
Remarkably, Taylor had driven almost four hours to Little Rock from Fayetteville to help Mapili cart off subpoenaed documents.
"That's just not a coincidence," said I.C. Smith, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Arkansas at the time.
"Here you've got lawyers stepping over one another there in Little Rock, and of all the people, she hooks up with Don Tyson's personal lawyer," Smith said in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily. "She didn't make that decision herself."
So who hooked her up with Tyson's lawyer? Again, Justice officials weren't interested in investigating.
Before subpoenaing Mapili for Trie's records, Smith had tried to get a device installed to record the numbers pulsed to and from Mapili's phone to see who she was talking to. But Washington objected.
But that's not all.
After agents complained about the boxes of documents taking flight from Trie's house, Justice sent a lawyer, William Corcoran, to Little Rock to meet with Taylor to review the documents.
Only, the meeting never took place.
"Corcoran overslept the morning of the meeting, and Taylor left and went back to Fayetteville with the documents," Smith said.
In sworn statements on Oct. 21 and 22, 1997 -- after the Senate hearings had ended -- Mapili confirmed agents' worst fears by admitting she destroyed and hid documents on orders from Trie, who had fled to China. She hid some documents in a credenza, and others under Trie's bed.
Finally, on Oct. 23, 1997, Justice officials OK'd a search warrant, and agents obtained documents sufficient to indict Trie. (The indictment was scheduled for November 1998, but officials postponed it until January 1998 -- after the election.) Trie was later convicted in a plea deal that spared him jail for his cooperation in further investigations.
All told, Trie gave $640,000 in illegal donations to the DNC and Clinton-Gore reelection effort, and $460,000 more in illegal donations to Clinton's legal defense fund. He made the donations to buy access to Clinton for Chinese benefactors such as Ng Lap Seng, a shady Macau tycoon, and Wang Jun, a Beijing arms dealer. They got the access, and possibly more.
Even so, Clinton was never a target, and agents were blocked from following any leads back to him.
"I was told by Laura Ingersoll that we would not pursue any matter relating to the solicitation or payment of funds for access to the presidency," Wehr testified before the Senate Sept. 22, 1999.
Why? "That's the way the American political process works," Wehr said Ingersoll told him.
"I was scandalized by that answer," Wehr said.
Ingersoll, who does not recall the conversation, was the first of many supervisors of Justice's campaign finance task force. A relatively green prosecutor, she was hand-picked by Lee Radek, who runs the task force as Public Integrity Section chief.
Radek, who privately told FBI officials at the outset of the probe in 1996 that he was under political "pressure" to throttle the probe to save then-Attorney General Janet Reno's job, was the intellectual muscle behind Reno's stubborn refusal not to turn the case over to an independent counsel.
Roberta Parker, lead FBI agent in Washington on the Trie case, also was compelled to testify in 1999.
She swore: "I was told [by Ingersoll] that we would not take into consideration the Presidential Legal Expense Trust [PLET] issue, and that we would not take into consideration the Senate subpoena obstruction issue for the search warrant."
She said Ingersoll wouldn't let agents use the illegal PLET checks from Trie as evidence for probable cause to search Trie's home.
'No doubt about' cover-up
All this begs the question: Did Justice prosecutors, under the orders of Reno and Radek, fix the investigation in favor of Clinton?
"There's no doubt about it," Smith said in a lengthy phone interview from his Virginia (cont)
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