Contributions To Clintons’ Defense Fund Returned
The legal defense fund for President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton returned $639,000 in questionable donations collected by an Arkansas businessman who apparently obtained most of the money from a Buddhist sect, it was disclosed Monday.
Charles Yah Lin Trie, a longtime friend of the president and owner of a popular Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, delivered two bundles of checks and money orders to the fund last March and April, said executive director Michael Cardozo.
The trustees returned both sets of contributions after a private investigator found that the majority of donations were raised from a Taiwanese-based Buddhist sect called Ching Hai, Cardozo said.
Trie, a U.S citizen and Democratic fundraiser, acknowledged earlier this month that a Little Rock export-import company he formed in 1994 improperly gave a foreign-generated $15,000 donation to the Democratic party two years ago.
Trie is emerging as an important figure in the controversy over foreign contributions to the Democratic Party. He has been a business partner of another Arkansan, former White House aide Mark Middleton, who solicited $50,000 from a Hong Kong billionaire for a foundation to make a museum out of Clinton’s first home in Hope, Ark.
Questions have been raised about whether Middleton and Trie improperly traded on their ties to the White House while drumming up business deals in Asia. After Trie’s initial meeting with Cardozo, he was appointed to a presidential commission on Asian trade.
The story of the returned contributions, as related by Cardozo, began last March 21 when Trie showed up at Cardozo’s Washington office with a manila envelope stuffed with $460,000 worth of checks and money orders.
“I had never met him. I didn’t know who he was,” Cardozo said in an interview Monday.
Taken aback by the size and manner of delivery of the contributions, Cardozo said he asked Trie for time to go through them. While Trie went to lunch, Cardozo and an assistant found $70,000 in clearly impermissible donations from corporations and other sources, Cardozo said.
Other suspicions were raised by many checks bearing the same handwriting, and many money orders were sequentially numbered, even though they were supposed to have come from different states.
When Trie returned from lunch, they returned the $70,000 and asked him to take the rest of the money to a lock box at NationsBank in Washington, which processes the fund’s contributions.
The bank then weeded out several more corporate checks and others that had failed to clear, leaving the fund with $380,000 in questionable donations to investigate from 409 individuals, Cardozo said.
In April, Trie again contacted Cardozo and tried to deliver another bundle of checks and contributions totaling $179,000. Cardozo said he told Trie the fund could not accept the money until questions surrounding the previous donation were answered.
The trustees notified White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes and Hillary Clinton of their findings, then returned all the contributions, with the Clintons’ assent.
The White House had no comment.