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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jamessmith who wrote (6183)	2/12/1998 12:45:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

Look at who the NYT's says probably paid to put Clinton in the WH - today's lead editorial: February 12, 1998 The Price of Scandal Fatigue The release of a Republican senators' report on the suspected Chinese Government effort to influence the 1996 election calls to mind poor old Bob Dole's most memorable line from that campaign. "Where's the outrage?" Mr. Dole would cry as he rambled through the heartland. Anyone reading the Senate investigative report could add a second question. Where's the curiosity? In normal times, both outrage and curiosity would greet this majority report from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. It cites troubling, albeit not conclusive, information from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation about a foreign power's effort to purchase influence through contributions to the Democratic National Committee. But these are not normal times. The public is suffering from scandal overload in matters both financial and sexual. Then there was the crippling tactical error from the committee chairman, Fred Thompson, in saying he would prove the Chinese connection. He didn't, and that has contributed to an odd reversal in which the committee's report has been read for what it does not contain, rather than what it has put on the public record. Some findings are beyond partisan dispute. Both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have information that is too sensitive for public release. Moreover, an important Democrat, Senator Joseph Lieberman, told The Times that this secret information showed that China's President, Jiang Zemin, "gave overarching approval" to a plan to lobby Congress. The Republican report goes further. "Although most discussion of PRC activities focused on Congress, the Committee's investigation suggests that China's efforts involved the 1996 Presidential race and state elections as well. The Committee has received information that the government of China may have allocated millions of dollars in 1996 alone to achieve its objectives." In another citation apparently based on intelligence sources, the Republicans asserted that two of President Clinton's main foreign contributors, James and Mochtar Riady, "had a long-term relationship with a Chinese intelligence agency." Given this information, the movement of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party from banks in and around China looks suspiciously like the execution of this Chinese strategy. Are the Republicans who wrote that hallucinating, or have American spies found information that ought to be more fully investigated? Those questions can be answered, and almost certainly will be, either through official sources or through investigative journalism. A partial answer may reside in the classified account of the committee's findings. If Attorney General Janet Reno had followed the law and appointed an independent counsel in this matter, he or she would certainly be all over this report, not because of what it fails to prove but because of the abundance of investigative leads it contains. For that matter, if Mr. Clinton were not himself at the center of the campaign abuses, he should long ago have demanded a thorough investigation of China's behavior to see whether Beijing was undermining America's electoral system even as he was seeking better relations with China. To repeat, this report does not definitively prove that the Chinese tried to tilt the election. It does show convincingly that the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department have a lot of authoritative information pointing in that direction. It does provide a road map of what is possibly being covered up if Ms. Reno's prosecutors let their investigation dwindle off to nothing. Finally, it shows that the American public has only the dimmest idea of the money flow in the '96 election and that if anyone had the energy for it, there is plenty to be curious about. nytimes.com