Clinton: Wang's White House Invitation 'Inappropriate' - Dec. 20, 1996
Trie Helped Arms Dealer Attend White House Reception - Dec. 20, 1996
White House Was Worried
About Offending Trust Fund Donors
WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, Dec. 23) -- After learning about suspicious donations to Bill and Hillary Clinton's legal trust fund, White House officials were worried they might offend the people who contributed if they returned the money.
At a meeting on May 9, officials including Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey and Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Margaret Williams, met to discuss $460,000 that Arkansas businessman Charles Yah Lin Trie, had delivered to the Presidential Legal Expense Trust in late March.
One official told The Associated Presss that Michael Cardozo, the trust's executive director, told participants the proper, cautious course would be to return the money.
Some White House aides, however, expressed concern that doing so would offend the donors and there was discussion over what to tell the contributors. The problem was that while some of the donations were suspicious on their face because of sequentially numbered money orders and apparently identical handwriting, other contributions appeared proper.
One official told AP the White House was concerned "that the donors might feel the money was being returned simply because they were Asian-Americans."
Others who attended the meeting included deputy chiefs of staff Harold Ickes and Evelyn Lieberman, White House counsel Jack Quinn and associate counsel Cheryl Mills.
The session could be of interest to Justice Department investigators, who have issued a subpoena seeking the trust's records. In addition, The Washington Post reported that White House officials offered varying accounts of the meeting when questioned about it on Sunday.
In an initial conversation, a White House official said some aides wanted to keep the contributions that appeared to be legitimate. But in a later conversation, the official said he had misunderstood the nature of the debate, and the real issue was what to tell contributors about why the money was being returned, according to the Post.
In a separate development in the Democratic fund-raising flap, President Clinton told The Los Angeles Times he has deliberately avoided direct criticism of Trie and the Democrats' other controversial fund-raiser, John Huang.
"The reason I have not been more critical of Charlie Trie or John Huang is that it is not clear to me ... to what extent they knew exactly what they were doing and whether it was wrong," Clinton said in an interview published today. "One thing we know is that the culture out of which they come doesn't draw the same bright lines between politics, government and business that we do."