White House Releases Records Of Fund-Raiser’s Visits Little Rock Restaurateur Delivered Questionable Donations To Defense Fund

Little Rock businessman Charles Yah Lin Trie visited the White House at least 23 times during the Clinton administration, including two Oval Office picture sessions with President Clinton and several other events for Democratic contributors attended by Clinton or Vice President Al Gore, according to documents released Wednesday.

The two-page summary released by the White House provides a sketchy outline of the White House visits by Trie, who delivered several hundred thousand dollars in questionable donations to the president’s legal defense fund earlier this year. White House officials said they could provide no further details about the visits.

Trie, a Democratic fund-raiser who now runs an international trading company, is a long-time Arkansas friend of Clinton’s, who regularly ate at his Chinese restaurant in Little Rock. He was thrust into the spotlight this week when the Presidential Legal Expense Trust, the fund established to help Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton pay their legal bills, revealed that Trie arrived in the office of the fund’s executive director last March with two manila envelopes full of checks and cashier’s checks.

The summary of White House visits released Wednesday shows 37 requests to have Trie cleared to enter the White House and 22 actual visits since the start of the Clinton administration.

In November 1995, Trie was approved to see Hillary Clinton, but she left for a trip before he arrived, the summary states. The White House couldn’t provide any details on the planned visit.

When she was informed last April about the problems with the defense trust donations turned in by Trie, Hillary Clinton initially told the trust executive director, Michael Cardozo, that she didn’t remember Trie, but she recalled him when Cardozo said he was a Little Rock restaurateur.

The trust returned on the spot some of the $460,000 delivered by Trie in March, and the rest of it later, after a private investigative firm determined that much of it came from members of a Buddhist sect, and that some of the contributors apparently didn’t have the means to give on their own and didn’t use their own funds.

Another $179,000 he tried to deliver in April was not accepted.

Also Wednesday, the legal defense fund released copies of its letters to the Trie-related donors rejecting their contributions. The first letter, dated June 26, thanks the donors for their “generosity and support” but says their checks need to be returned “as a result of the volume of these contributions and the unique manner in which these contributions were delivered.”

However, the letter takes pains to point out, “This does not mean you cannot make a contribution if you meet the requirements described in the enclosed fact sheet” and provides the address to which checks should be sent. That statement produced another $122,000 in contributions.

When further investigation turned up problems with some of those donations, the defense fund returned that money as well.