“The White House is like a subway. You have to put in coins to open the gates.”
Such were the immortal words of one Johnny Chung, who admitted to a Senate committee in 1997 that he funneled $100,000 from the Chinese military to the Democratic National Committee. In the Clinton White House, it was pay to play all the way. That either Bill or Hillary had a political life after their treasonous run on Asian piggy banks is a testament to the ever escalating corruption of the American media.
The White House honcho who made the subways run on time – no shock here – was Hillary Clinton. It was she who convened the secret meeting with adviser Dick Morris in the White House treaty room a month after the Democrats’ historic drubbing in November 1994. Blamed for the debacle, the Clintons were running for their political lives. To preserve those lives would take huge amounts of money, much of it, if not most, raised and spent illegally.
“The president and his top advisors took control of the DNC and designed a plan to engage in a historically aggressive fund-raising effort, utilizing the DNC as a vehicle for getting around federal election laws,” the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, also known as the Thompson Committee, reported in March 1998. “The DNC ran television advertisements, created under the direct supervision of the president.”
The deepest pockets the Clintons plundered belonged to the Riadys, an ethnic Chinese family that worked out of Indonesia. The Thompson Committee cited any number of large-scale Riady joint ventures in China, their principal partner in the People’s Republic being an enterprise called China Resources, “a company wholly-owned and operated by the PRC government.” The Riadys had invested in Bill Clinton back in Arkansas and bailed him out during the 1992 primary campaign. As payback, they were allowed to put their man John Huang in the Commerce Department.
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And what were Huang’s talents? A letter sent by an Asian outreach advocate on the stationery of the then-president pro tem of the California state Senate was frank to a fault: “John is the Riady family’s top priority for placement because he is like one of their own.” The Riady family, in case anyone needed reminding, “invested heavily in the Clinton campaign.” To some, those were credentials enough.
Huang’s actual work was icing on the cake. The Thompson Committee makes this striking admission: “[a]lthough Huang’s first day at Commerce was July 18, 1994, he was granted his first security clearance in January 1994.”
Huang proved his worth in June 1994. With Clinton crony Webster Hubbell on the ropes after a scandal forced him out of his job in the Justice Department, Huang arranged a $100,000 Riady payout to Hubbell. This occurred two days after Huang and James Riady met with the president in the Oval Office and a week after Hillary met with Hubbell. That payout – and $300,000 more – helped buy Hubbell’s silence. Despite a ton of legal pressure, he never talked.
It should have surprised no one that the Clintons would head for Indonesia a week after the November 1994 debacle. They saw it coming and planned ahead. Not only did the Clintons have to impress the Riadys on their own home turf, but they also had to start squeezing the CEOs accompanying them in a more systematic way. It was about this time that the $100,000 donation to travel with the Clintons morphed from a discreet expectation into the price of admission.
The Thompson Committee described what happened during the next two years. “The president and his aides demeaned the offices of the president and vice president, took advantage of minority groups, pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well.” This was business as usual for Bill and Hillary Clinton. “Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions,” concluded the Thompson Committee, ” much of it from foreign sources.”
