Posted on 05/06/2004 5:27:27 AM PDT by BobKeyser
Wang Jun's excellent White House adventure
By Jack Cashill © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Soon after Ron Brown returned from New York to pick up a reported $1.2 million from Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz, he learned he would be meeting – by order of the White House – with a character by the name of Wang Jun. The sheer bravado of Wang Jun's petition and the brazenness of the Clintons in welcoming him leave one awestruck.
Wang Jun chaired Poly Technologies, a company controlled by the People's Liberation Army. According to a Rand Corporation report forced from the U.S. Department of Commerce by a federal lawsuit, one of Poly Technologies' profit centers was the "importation and distribution of semi-automatic rifles for the U.S. domestic market." Between 1987 and 1993, the company and its affiliates sold more than $200 million worth of these guns in the United States.
When Clinton piously signed into law the banning of certain semi-automatic weapons in 1994, Poly Technologies only profited. They exploited export loopholes to circumvent the ban and ultimately resorted to old-fashioned smuggling. By 1996, these weapons were flooding the inner cities of California.
On the day of the Wang Jun meeting, Feb. 6, 1996, Brown confidante Nolanda Hill was staying at the Watergate Hotel. Brown only knew the meeting was to be about satellite export controls, as Wang Jun also owned a huge stake in a Hong Kong satellite company. Brown showed Hill the briefing book on the meeting. His task was to assure the Chinese that America intended to be a most friendly trading partner. If Wang Jun ever had any problems dealing with the United States, he could call Brown directly at any time. Hill was beside herself.
"You're putting us at risk with all this Chinese money and Loral crap," she told him. She and Brown were under so much scrutiny already, they could scarcely afford drawing any more heat. Hill implored him to pass on the meeting, but the White House had ordered him to go.
Later that afternoon, the White House also insisted Brown join Wang Jun at an intimate "coffee" with President Clinton. It was an only-in-America kind of moment. Wang Jun, who had cut arms deals with Chinese allies in places like Libya, Iran, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan, now found himself at a cordial private coffee with – of all people – the president of the United States.
Clinton pal Charlie Trie had greased the Wang Jun meeting with a $50,000 payment. Evidence suggests Trie laundered the money through a Wall Street player named Ernest Green. Under oath, Green would later attribute the multi-thousand dollar traveler's checks he received from Charlie Trie to "a gentlemen's bet on a basketball game."
To the president's humble credit, as the Thompson Committee would later report, he did admit that the meeting with the PLA arms dealer, Wang Jun, was "clearly inappropriate." The president did not apologize, however, for signing waivers for four more satellite launches by Chinese rockets on that same February day. The president approved these waivers despite reports the month before that China continued to export nuclear technology to Pakistan and missiles to Iran, the latter deal Wang Jun was suspected of brokering.
Wang Jun ran into problems of his own when on May 23, 1996, CNN breathlessly reported "the largest seizure of smuggled automatic weapons in U.S. history." The San Francisco Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had infiltrated a smuggling ring and confiscated 2,000 fully automatic AK-47 rifles imported from China. The weapons were found on board a COSCO ship, the enterprise that had been trying to secure the Long Beach Naval Station. CNN traced the rifles to Wang Jun's Poly Technologies.
Wang Jun, however, had not wasted his investment. Someone in the know did the arms merchant a large favor by leaking the news of the BATF gun-smuggling investigation well before it was wrapped up. The Bay-area bust was premature. The BATF was not able to nail the operation's ringleaders.
Ron Brown knew Bernie Schwartz. He knew Wang Jun. He knew the Riadys and the Lums and John Huang. He knew about the Chinese navy's attempt to secure a bridgehead in Long Beach. He even knew about Mack McLarty and the Oklahoma deal. He knew what money was involved and where it went, and he transported a whole lot of it – much of which was never recorded. Ron Brown, in fact, knew way too much at a time when the media knew almost nothing. If there was any one man in America whose knowledge could undo the "process" and sink Bill Clinton, it was Brown.
Later that same month, at the Schwartz and Wang Jun meetings, February 1996, in a private session in the White House family quarters between Ron Brown and the president, Bill and Hillary Clinton finally came to understand this.
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Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
IF YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE MEDIA AND WOULD LIKE TO SCHEDULE AN INTERVIEW WITH JACK CASHILL, PLEASE EMAIL BOB KEYSER AT rkeyser5@nycap.rr.com
However, since it involves the Clinton, there's nothing to see here so just move on...
It's such a coincidence that he happened to be on that plane that went down, due to bad weather.
Will this be coming out in book form soon?
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