Documents Detail Clinton Fund Raising Democratic Party Was Counting On President To Raise $50 Million

President Clinton’s re-election team fashioned a brazenly aggressive fund-raising plan that leveraged the prestige of the presidency and the White House to overcome millions of dollars of campaign debt and raise record amounts of money as it entered the 1996 election year, according to White House documents released Wednesday.

When campaign aides faced a cash shortfall in December 1995, they planned for Clinton to make up to 20 phone calls to contributors to meet a million-dollar-a-week goal for the month. Overall, they wanted Clinton to raise $50 million in a remarkably intense nationwide series of coffees, dinners and galas.

Clinton has said he does not recall making calls to donors, but he would not rule out that he did. White House special counsel Lanny Davis told reporters that the Democratic National Committee had prepared a call list of potential donors for the president as well as first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he added that they apparently never received the list.

Campaign fund-raisers also set a goal of $10.8 million for Vice President Al Gore and $5 million for Hillary Clinton. The plan called for both to make phone calls as well, though it was unclear how many, if any, they actually made.

The documents made clear that the campaign operation worked intimately with officials at the highest levels of government, erasing any pretense that the White House and the Democratic National Committee fund-raising operations were separate.

The disclosures about the financial straits of the Clinton re-election campaign effort and the plan to trade on the allure of the White House and the presidency were contained in nearly 2,000 pages of documents released by the White House. The pressure for money came primarily from an unprecedented strategy to spend at least $10 million on television ads to promote Clinton and attack Republicans in the year before the election.

The documents had been in the files of former White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, and they will be examined by two congressional committees and possibly an independent counsel. Other documents, detailing such things as contributors who rode on Air Force One, will be released in coming days.

Though the documents did not appear to contain any startling revelations, they added detail to a rare portrait of the inner workings of a presidential campaign and the near obsession of the Clinton White House and campaign team with raising money.

Clinton’s money-raisers targeted various ethnic groups - Greek, Jewish, Hispanic, African American - and regional loyalists such as Southerners. They focused on those donors who could produce huge contributions. At one point, a top campaign aide, Peter Knight, suggested to Clinton that he had identified 10 contributors who could donate $2 million to $5 million apiece.

The documents make even clearer that a series of coffees with the president at the White House were carefully planned fund-raising events, despite disavowals by the administration. The documents projected that each was to bring in $400,000, and it turned out that was how much was raised in most cases.

Administration officials said the coffees did not violate campaign laws prohibiting fund raising at the White House because no solicitations were made as a condition for attendance.

“We do not deny that the (coffees) had express fund-raising goals,” Davis said, asserting that there was nothing illegal about them.

Many of the documents had substantial portions blocked out and some pages in sequences of documents were missing; Ickes and the Democratic National Committee claimed privileges of privacy and confidentiality.

The documents also strongly suggested that the Clinton administration took the president’s re-election effort to a new level in its scope and use of the president’s time and the rarefied setting of the White House for political ends.

“The fund-raising needs for the DNC will require a very substantial commitment of time from the president, the vice president, the first lady and Mrs. Gore,” Ickes wrote in one memo to Clinton and Gore. The words “very substantial” were underlined.

The campaign even exploited Clinton’s saxophone playing to great financial end, raking in several million dollars from saxophone enthusiasts in many cities.

At one point, the campaign considered using a list of donors to Clinton’s legal defense fund, created to help him pay his legal bills in the Whitewater affair, but it rejected the idea after finding it violated ethics rules.

Davis defended the administration’s actions.

“I don’t think there is anything you can call ‘new news’ here,” he said.

He said the president acted “appropriately,” and that Republicans outspent Democrats by millions of dollars. Davis said the documents showed “the intensity and comprehensiveness of the effort to compete in this very, very difficult contest.”

The documents outlined a month-by-month, national canvass for cash, underscoring the remarkable amount of time and effort that were devoted to the effort by the president and many of his top surrogates.

The Ickes files also demonstrated that Clinton’s endorsement of a controversial plan by strategist Dick Morris to flood television airwaves with ads a year before the election, at a time when the president faced no primary opposition, came to haunt Ickes and others who monitored campaign spending.

Ickes repeatedly cautioned in memos that it would be difficult to meet fund-raising goals and equally challenging to comply with federal election laws requiring a precise ratio between unlimited soft-money donations and highly regulated fixed federal contributions.