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Smoke and mirrors
When Gore says he wants to ban "soft money" what he's really trying to do is divert attention from his role in the biggest fund-raising scandal in history.
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By David Horowitz
March 14, 2000 | Much of the news about Vice President Al Gore these days has the pungent odor of chickens coming home to roost:
Maria Hsia, agent of the Chinese dictatorship, "a friend and political supporter" to Gore, is convicted on five felony counts for breaking U.S. election laws, including illegally raising funds from foreign nationals to put in Gore's campaign pocket at the infamous Buddhist Temple event.
Charlie Trie, gangster, Chinese agent and old President Clinton crony from Arkansas, is convicted of having raised hundreds of thousands of illegal dollars for the DNC from friends with ties to the Indonesian military and Chinese intelligence. (Chief fund-raiser for the DNC in these transactions was John Huang, personal fund-raiser for Clinton, Chinese intelligence asset and agent for the Riady empire -- a billion-dollar Chinese syndicate with ties to Chinese military and intelligence agencies.) Trie is also the genius who came up with the idea to use the Buddhist Temple as a front for Chinese money headed for the Clinton-Gore campaign coffers.
Testimony is heard from White House employees about a possible case of obstruction of justice wherein 100,000 e-mails about funny campaign finance practices were withheld from investigators.
A memo is leaked from former Justice Department official Charles La Bella, establishing that Attorney General Janet Reno refused the pleas of her senior advisors and the head of the FBI to appoint independent counsels to investigate possible criminal activities of the Clintons and Gore in connection with the China campaign-finance scandal.
And, most chilling of all, China threatens war over Taiwan, and threatens Taiwan's protector, the United States. Here is the way the Chinese Liberation Army Daily described its government's threat: "China ... is a country that has certain abilities of launching strategic counter-attack and the capacity of launching a long-distance strike."
That's just the front-page news of the past two weeks. Is there a connection between these stories? You bet. The biggest cover-up in American political history is, in fact, designed to conceal the connection between the biggest fund-raising scandal and the biggest national security disaster in American political history.
Without the active help of the Clinton-Gore administration, and its reversal of established security policies protecting nuclear secrets and sensitive military technologies, the Chinese today would not be able to issue a credible threat against Taiwan and the United States.
That's because without the catastrophic transfer of nuclear, missile, satellite and computer technologies that has occurred during the Clinton-Gore administration, the United States would have been able to forestall any Chinese attack on Taiwan by threatening China with large-scale destruction. American military officials previously were secure in the knowledge that China could not retaliate in kind. But now, thanks to the activities of Clinton, Gore and probably Hsia, Huang and Trie, China can retaliate.
In seven years of Clinton-Gore rule, therefore, the United States has gone from being an invulnerable superpower to a nation that no longer has a shield against Chinese nuclear missile attacks. This is a direct consequence of (1) the violation of U.S. security laws by Clinton-Gore campaign funders like the Loral Corporation, which provided key restricted satellite and missile technologies to China; (2) the removal of security controls and the lax attitude towards security by Clinton-Gore cabinet members like Hazel O'Leary; and (3) the Clinton-Gore team's systematic removal of security controls on commercial transfers, particularly for supercomputers, essential for the Chinese to develop their nuclear and missile technologies.
Were these policy changes the price Clinton-Gore paid for the illegal monies they received? We can't say this with certainty, since the Clinton-Gore machine and its surrogates have successfully obstructed every effort to investigate these matters by the Justice Department and by congressional committees. More than 100 witnesses have taken the Fifth Amendment or fled the country with the explicit or tacit support of the Clinton-Gore Administration. In some cases, we now know, the Clinton-Gore White House has intimidated other witnesses into not cooperating with duly authorized investigations.
There was yet another related item in the news last week. It was Gore's announcement that he is going to make campaign-finance reform a focus of his presidential run. In a pre-emptive move, he also acknowledged that his collusion in the Buddhist Temple scam to funnel illegal Chinese money into his electoral pocket was a "mistake." Actually it was a crime, as Hsia's five felony convictions indicate. Gore says he wants to ban soft money, which is still perfectly legal and an expression of free-speech rights. Even if one thinks soft money is a problem, it is a fly in the ointment compared to the abuses of which Gore is accused.
Why does Gore suddenly want to talk about perfectly legal soft money that American citizens give to the party of their choice? Maybe because he doesn't want to talk about the Chinese money and what it bought.
salon.com | March 14, 2000
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About the writer
David Horowitz's odyssey from '60s radical to cultural conservative is described in his autobiography, "Radical Son." He is the president of the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles and the editor of FrontPage Magazine. For more columns by Horowitz, visit his column archive.
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