International Policy Drift - Page A4
February 21, 1997 COVER-UP:JOHN HAUNG
by Staff Journalists, The Daily Republican Newspaper
CAMPAIGN FRAUD FOUND!
WASHINGTON DESK - When president Clinton's friend, John Huang was working under the direction of Commerce secretary Ron Brown, he was also apparenttly arranging for an Asian-American business group with 700 members in suburban Washington, D.C., to 'launder' more than $250,000 before sending it over to the DNC/Clinton-Gore Campaign. The plan that Huang set in motion was a false pretense that the money was contributions from the group's members. Under campaign law, it's illegal to contribute money in someone else's name or obscure the true source of donations.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that the Asian-American leader contacted by John Huang was Rawlein Soberano, who told the Post that Huang offered to pay him $45,000 as a fee for the deal, but Soberano balked. "I said no. I knew when you do this kind of thing, it's no different from laundering money from the drug lords," Soberano told reporters.
Soberano said Huang made the proposal over lunch in the Summer of 1996, and did not identify the true source of the money.
The DNC/Clinton-Gore Campaign has been forced to return $1.2 million raised by Huang after pulic disclosure that the true source of the money was not the person or persons claimed by the DNC/Clinton-Gore Campaing documents.
The Democrat Party fund-raising debacle is being probed by the Senate panel which has requested president Clinton's legal defense fund to turn over all its records on how it was formed, who runs it, its tax status and its procedures for accepting money, and the identities of its purported 'donors'.
The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee issued a subpoena Wednesday for complete records of the fund, known as the Presidential Legal Expense Trust. The fund was created to help defer the legal expenses of Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Senate investigators are looking into some $460,000 that businessman Charles Yah Lin Trie delivered to the fund in March 1996. That money had to be returned after an internal investigation raised questions about the true source of the money.