As the Clinton administration fended off new questions over proposals to trade White House perks for donations, the Democratic Party on Friday returned another $1.5 million worth of questionable and improper campaign contributions.
Republican congressional sources released an anonymous memo, drawn from the papers of former deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, proposing that President Clinton offer donors seats on Air Force One and appointments to government positions.
The one-page, unsigned and undated memo includes a 10-point list of proposed perks for contributors, such as “better coordination on appointments to Boards and Commissions.”
“In order to reach our very aggressive goal of $40 million this year, it would be helpful if we could coordinate the following activities,” said the memo to Martha Phipps, identified by the Democratic National Committee as a former employee.
The list of suggested perks included: “Two seats on Air Force I and II trips; six seats at all private dinners; six to eight spots at all White House events; official delegation trips abroad; White House mess privileges; White House residence visits and overnight visits.”
“It looks like a wish list written by someone who clearly did not know the rules,” said Democratic Party national chairman Steve Grossman.
White House spokesman Mike McCurry said officials were still studying the memo. “Some of the things that are listed on this one document did happen, others didn’t happen,” McCurry said.
White House officials have acknowledged that they used events there to encourage and reward donors, but say no solicitation of money ever occurred at the executive mansion. It is illegal to solicit donations on federal property.
The White House earlier this week released several hundred pages of documents from Ickes’ files, including records that showed Clinton embracing proposals to use White House sleepovers and coffees to reward big-ticket donors.
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Administration officials are withholding an additional 5,000 pages that Ickes turned over to congressional investigators. McCurry said those records are being reviewed to determine if they detailed internal party matters that should be kept confidential.
“We’ll look and see what his attorneys have actually produced and then see if there’s anything that we can do with it to continue to make available and public the information that the president wants the American public to have on the subject,” McCurry said.
Ickes said through his lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, that he did not write the one-page memo and does not recall how it came to be among his papers.
Seeking to put the best face on a bad situation, the new Democratic Party general chairman, Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, said the nearly $3 million returned by the Democrats since Clinton was re-elected last November represents only 1.3 percent of the total raised by the party between 1994 and 1996.
“That’s a serious amount, but it’s a small percentage of the overall amount raised,” Romer said.
Auditors hired by the Democrats examined every contribution over $5,000 made at any fundraiser targeting the Asian Pacific American community, and the party will return $1,492,051 in addition to the $1,471,800 that already had been given back because of questions about the money’s sources.
Three-quarters of the $3 million in returned funds were collected by three fundraisers whose activities are under scrutiny by the Justice Department. They are:
Little Rock deal maker Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie, who raised $645,000; California fax systems developer Johnny Chung, who gave $366,000; and John Huang–the former director of U.S. operations for the Indonesian Lippo Group conglomerate who became a Commerce Department official, then a full-time fundraiser.
Some $1.6 million of the $3.4 million raised by Huang has been returned. While some smaller donations still are being examined, the rest of the money was determined to be proper, Democratic officials said.
Among other funds returned:
– $40,000 from Wireless Advantage Inc., a corporation associated with stock swindler Eric Wynn, who attended a White House coffee five months after he was found guilty of manipulating stocks to benefit an alleged member of New York’s Bonanno crime family and another man who gave $75,000 to the party.
– $143,000 from Farhad Azima, an Iranian-American whose aircraft leasing company has been embroiled in disputes with tax authorities and government regulators.
Azima also gave $3,000 in 1996 to Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), whose Senate Governmental Affairs Committee is planning to review Democratic contributions. Azima is a former legal client of Thompson who has held fundraisers for the senator.
Of the amount returned by the Democrats, $54,241 was for in-kind contributions, mostly the use of Azima’s Kansas City-based corporation’s jets. The DNC said the contributions were “deemed inappropriate” but would not elaborate.
– $50,000 in contributions “deemed inappropriate” from Empire Sanitary Landfill near Scranton, Pa. A seven-count federal indictment against the firm’s president was dropped in August after the government’s key witness died of cancer two days before the trial was to start. There was no answer at the company’s office Friday.
– $64,050 from a fundraiser at the Hsi Lai temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif., attended by Vice President Al Gore, who later said it was a mistake to hold a fundraiser at a tax-exempt religious organization. The Democratic Party is returning only 44 percent of the money raised there–contributions they determined were funneled from someone other than the named donor or given by a person who wasn’t an American citizen.
“It is clear that we did not monitor the contribution process adequately enough in the recent past,” Romer said. “The DNC made mistakes, and we put in place a thorough and rigorous monitoring system that will prevent those kinds of problems in the future.”
At the White House, spokesman McCurry issued a prepared statement:
“The president and the White House believe they (the DNC) are doing the appropriate thing to correct any mistakes that they have identified and to return contributions they should not have accepted and to implement new procedures that will address the shortcomings the president himself has identified, taken responsibility for and asked to be corrected.”
In a news conference to announce the return of the $1.5 million, Romer swiped at Republican congressmen for being more beholden than the Democrats to big-ticket contributors. Romer said Republicans fought Clinton’s programs to curb teenage smoking and ban assault weapons because of donations made by tobacco corporations and the National Rifle Association.
Congressional Republicans also “rewrote” workplace safety laws and environmental rules in response to the donations they received from business lobbyists, Romer said.
“We believe the special interest was far outweighing the public interest at that time,” Romer said.
Romer said he welcomes the Justice Department investigation into whether Chinese sources had funneled contributions to the party to gain access to federal officials.
“The issue of national security is one that goes beyond any partisanship. I think we all want it investigated,” he said.
Several Asian-American donors have said they felt insulted and humiliated by the intrusive questions asked by the Democrats’ auditors.
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“One of them felt like he was a criminal–I apologized to him personally,” Romer said.