Thompson Tells Critics To ‘Settle Down A Bit’

Urging “everyone to take a deep breath and settle down a bit,” Sen. Fred Thompson responded Sunday to criticism that the first week of Senate hearings on campaign-finance abuses had been fat on speech and innuendo and skimpy on details and corroborative evidence.

Thompson, the Tennessee Republican who heads the committee holding the hearings, also stood by his explosive opening statement that the Chinese government had tried to influence last year’s elections.

Thompson made his remarks in a network news interview program Sunday, as did several other people involved in the campaign-finance issue.

The lawyer for John Huang, a central figure in the Democratic fund-raising controversy, said his client might have violated some “complicated” campaign-finance laws.

The lawyer, Ty Cobb, reiterated his hope that Huang would get limited immunity from prosecution so he could testify before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

But Cobb, who appeared on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” insisted that the committee would not be able to tie Huang to allegations that China had illegally funneled money into the elections.

Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, the committee’s ranking Democrat, has been highly critical of Thompson’s use of intelligence information on China and he repeated that criticism Sunday.

Glenn, on the ABC News program “This Week,” said he had access to the same classified documents, from the FBI, but had come to a less certain conclusion.

He said Thompson had played around “loosely” with intelligence on China.

Thompson, on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” responded by saying: “I would not go out and make a statement like this if it was not on solid ground and if I had not had the opportunity to let some people see this before I did it.”

But his charges against China have been apparently undercut by the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI and which is seeking to distance itself from Thompson’s assertion that his information was cleared by security officials.

In a July 11 letter to Thompson, Andrew Fois, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, wrote: “As you know, that review, which was conducted at your request, was only for the purpose of protecting classified information and the integrity of the pending criminal investigation.

“You neither requested nor received assessments of the accuracy of any conclusions you drew from information available to the committee.”

Glenn also cited the letter when he said Thompson’s conclusion was more far-reaching than his own. Intelligence officials “don’t necessarily go along with his conclusions,” Glenn said.

For his part, Thompson said repeatedly Sunday that he could not provide any more details about his allegations linking the Chinese government to the 1996 elections. But he said again that the investigation extended to Republican campaigns as well.

He also raised the possibility that the investigations could be extended past the end of the year, if warranted. In three days of testimony last week the committee heard from only one witness, Richard Sullivan, the former finance director of the Democratic National Committee.

The committee plans to hold hearings on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for the rest of July and may then resume them in the fall. To those who view the prospect of marathon hearings as numbing, Thompson asked for patience.

“I said in the very beginning, in my opening statement, these hearings are not soap operas designed to titillate,” he said. “They’re not athletic events where we keep a running score. I guess I should have saved my breath.”