She Hsu'd Have Known Better
By INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 17, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Election 2008: Hillary Clinton claims ignorance over Norman Hsu's dirty money. But she was right in the middle of a nearly identical fundraising scandal a decade ago.
In fact, she was briefed about the prior scandal by an aide who's advising her campaign today. Rewind to 1996, when Hillary headed her husband's legal defense fund during his re-election bid.
On April 4 of that year, she received a damage-control briefing from fund trustees and a top White House aide about more than $600,000 in questionable donations bundled by Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, a Chinese bagman who ran a restaurant in Little Rock, Ark.
Where was the feeling of deja vu?
The largest chunk of the haul — $463,000 — raised flags among fund trustees, because it was delivered by Trie in two manila envelopes stuffed full of sequentially numbered money orders from different parts of the country. All bore the same handwriting.
It was agreed at the meeting that the the dirty cash would be kept secret until after the election — and even then, the names of donors would never be disclosed. It was also agreed donors would be free to re-send any returned money.
The existence of Trie's funny money wasn't publicly acknowledged until the scandal broke in the media a month after the election.
The Clintons reluctantly returned the funds, along with an additional $122,000 raised by Trie from Asian donors with low-paying jobs.
Soon the FBI and Congress launched probes, and the White House was compelled to turn over documents from the April 1996 briefing that Hillary attended.
The smoking gun came in the form of handwritten notes taken by deputy White House chief of staff Harold Ickes.
"Charlie Trie — Money orders — Don't report names if $ are returned," Ickes wrote. "Could return all $ & ask people to resend it if they want."
Then this: "BC/HRC to put it out of his mind and wait until after the election." BC stands for Bill Clinton, HRC for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Ickes cited "HRC" several other times in his notes.
If this sounds like deja vu, it is.
Hillary's presidential campaign knew since at least June that there were serious questions about China-born Hsu, her own top fundraiser now behind bars.
Yet she agreed to return the $860,000 he bundled for her from mostly Asian donors only after the scandal broke in the press. Even so, she's declined to publicly identify the 260 donors, and may ask for some of the funds back.
Now as then, Ickes is involved, this time as an adviser to her campaign. And the same guy who courted all the shady Asian donors in last decade's Clinton campaigns is heading Hillary's fundraising now. His name: Terry McAuliffe. Seems they're up to their old tricks.
Hillary claims she had no reason to vet big Asian donors to her presidential campaign, no reason to be suspicious of them. She suggests critics who think she should have been more suspect are racist.
"We reject the suggestion that suspicion should be based on ethnicity in America," her spokesman said.
But the Ickes notes clearly show Hillary had every reason to check out Hsu, with whom she and Bill snapped photos and whom she let fete her campaign manager in all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas.
Even though she was first lady at the time, Hillary was a key point person for her husband's fundraising activities and had close ties to Trie and other shady Chinese donors.
These included Johnny Chung, who delivered a $50,000 check to her in the White House — money that came from leaders of China's military.
The FBI had warned the White House, based on wire intercepts, that Beijing was trying to influence Democrats ahead of the election. These warnings obviously went unheeded.
Hsu is cut from the same cloth as the other ethnic-Chinese hustlers and bagmen with whom Hillary rubbed elbows last decade.
She should have known better than to look the other way as he raised more money for her than anybody. |
