Gore Insists Fund Raising Legal, Ethical Then Vice President Promises He Won’t Do It Again

In an unusual bid at political damage control, Vice President Al Gore Monday defended his aggressive role in Democratic Party fund raising by declaring that he never did “anything wrong, much less illegal,” but pledging not to repeat the actions that most recently brought him under fire.

With his reputation at stake as his possible presidential campaign looms on the horizon, Gore said in a White House news conference he would not have used his office phone on “a few occasions” to help the Democratic National Committee raise millions of dollars had he anticipated the damaging perception it would create.

But Gore, defending himself amid assertions that no previous vice president solicited campaign funds from the White House, said he “never did anything that I felt was wrong, much less illegal. … I felt like I was doing the right thing.”

Federal law has long been interpreted by many legal authorities as prohibiting fund raising on federal property. In a memo to the staffs of Gore and President Clinton, then-White House counsel Abner Mikva warned in 1995: “Campaign activities of any kind are prohibited in or from government buildings.”

Mikva’s memo also stated that “no fund-raising phone calls or mail may emanate from the White House.”

Gore said the law exempts the president and vice president from the fund-raising prohibition. And during the often-contentious news conference, he repeatedly offered a terse defense that appeared carefully written by his lawyers: “My counsel advises me that there is no controlling legal authority or case that says that there was any violation of law whatsoever in the manner in which I asked people to contribute to our re-election campaign.”

But several leading Republican authorities on ethics law disagreed with Gore’s interpretation.

Greg Walden, who advised President Bush on ethics issues as an associate White House counsel, said the law states “no person” shall raise political money on federal property.

“I don’t see the exemption,” Walden said. “Based on my reading, both the president and vice president cannot fund-raise in a government building.”

Some Democratic senators also have assailed Gore’s fund-raising calls from the White House as inappropriate and indefensible.

Gore, whose White House fund-raising calls were reported Sunday by the Washington Post, said he first used the phone in his White House office for fund raising in December 1995, a period when Clinton-Gore re-election strategists were pushing for millions of dollars for television ads.

The Post reported that Gore’s fund-raising network collected $40 million of the $180 million the DNC received for the 1996 election.

“There were a few other sessions during which I made telephone calls in the spring of 1996” from the White House, Gore said. He said he charged all the calls to a DNC credit card, “and was advised there was nothing wrong with that practice.”

Others disagreed. C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel during the Bush administration, said the law against fund raising on federal property clearly applied to Gore. He said Gore’s acknowledgment that he did raise funds from his office is “the most serious” matter revealed in recent months in the fund-raising affair, which also has shaken Clinton and the DNC.

“I think that is a problem for him, a serious legal problem,” Gray said. “I don’t think it is an excuse that he charged the long distance calls. He is in his office using a government phone. The guidelines say ‘no solicitation’ on government property.”

Gore maintained he was covered by a separate section of the law prohibiting fund raising on federal property that applies to officers and employees of the government. His argument appeared based on defining an elected official as different from an officer or employee of the government.

But Gray and Walden said the law does not explicitly exempt the vice president or president, who receive government paychecks. And Mikva was quoted by Newsweek magazine Monday as saying that if he had known about fund-raising activities occurring in the White House, he “sure as hell would have been upset about it - and we would have put a stop to it.”

“Any Philadelphia lawyer knows you don’t raise money in a government building,” Mikva said.

Ellen Miller, of the reform group Public Campaign, also criticized Gore’s actions. “The specter of having a vice president make a heavy pitch on contributors is something that ought to be illegal even if it is not,” she said.

In hindsight, Gore said, he would have acted differently. “If I had realized in advance that this would cause such concern then I wouldn’t have done it in the first place.”

But when he was asked if he made mistakes in calling contributors from the White House, he paused for several seconds and said, “No.”

Yet they would be his last White House fund-raising calls, he indicated.

“I have decided to adopt a policy of not making any such calls ever again,” Gore said, “notwithstanding the fact that they are charged to the Democratic National Committee as a matter of policy.”