The more things change, the more they remain the same.But, here's Jean Keri the evening of November 2nd ...
Posted on 04/24/2004 11:58:42 AM PDT by Libloather
Opinion : Letters Opinion : Letters
Illegal campaign contributions add to Kerry's election coffers
April 05, 2004
Kudos to Brooke Barrash and the College Republicans for sponsoring the debate among Senatorial candidates on Feb. 24. The following information will be of interest to TU students regarding John Kerry, a presidential candidate.
My novel, “The China Connection,” focuses on illegal campaign contributions by the Chinese military. Liu Chao-ying and Johnny Chung, conduits for Chinese money funneled to the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton-Gore Re-election Committee and several senators favorable to Chinese interests, figure prominently.
In 1996, Kerry met with Liu Chao-ying and Johnny Chung. Liu’s father is Liu Haquing, former vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, Congress of the Communist Party, and China’s military satellite program’s chief. Back then she was vice president of China Aerospace Technologies, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Aerospace Group, and a Lieutenant Colonel in the Chinese Army’s Intelligence section. In other words, a Chinese spy.
During the meeting, Liu and Chung requested Kerry’s help in getting her company listed on the Stock Exchange. Kerry directed an aide to set up a meeting for them with SEC officials. Shortly, Chung hosted a fund-raiser in Beverly Hills, raking in $10,000 for Kerry’s re-election campaign.
Later, bank records subpoenaed by the FBI showed that a chunk of Kerry’s campaign stash came from $300,000 in wire transfers sent to Chung by Ji Shengde, China’s Military Intelligence Chief. These illegal contributions were routed through Liu’s foreign bank account. Her company later benefited from waivers granted by Mr. Clinton’s Commerce Department, to Loral Space & Communications, which illegally passed top-secret missile technology to Liu’s parent firm in Beijing. The bipartisan Cox Commission found that China used this technology to perfect its ICBMs. Before 1990, China’s missiles could only reach Alaska and Washington State. But by the end of that decade, thanks in part to Kerry, Chinese ICBMs could strike the entire United States.
Testifying in Congressional hearings, Chung stated that Ji, China’s intelligence Chief, told him, “We like your president (Clinton). We want him re-elected.” Beijing felt the same way about John Kerry.
Little wonder. Kerry has voted against every military appropriations bill since his election: from funding the B-1 bomber to a missile defense shield for America and its allies. On every major security issue of his time, Kerry has been on the wrong side, favoring a nuclear freeze in the ’80s that would have stalled the Cold War in place with a Soviet advantage, and voting to cut CIA appropriations, something for which we paid with American lives on 9/11.
The assistance given to Liu, a foreign spy, receipt of contributions form foreign nationals, a violation of campaign financing law and the positions he has taken on national defense, indicate that Kerry has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be trusted with our national security.
Anthony J. Sacco
author, The China Connection
That Gorelick memo was written in 1995...
Topic: White Water
CHUNG CHARGED, EXPECTED TO PLEAD GUILTY TO ILLEGAL CLINTON FUNDING
March 6, 1998
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
California businessman Johnny Chung, a focus of campaign-finance-abuse investigations by the Justice Department and Congress, was charged Thursday with illegally funneling money to the Clinton-Gore re-election committee by reimbursing donors he had asked to contribute.
Mr. Chung, a frequent White House visitor who gave a $50,000 campaign check to first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief of staff at the White House in 1995, was accused of income-tax evasion, bank fraud and conspiracy to violate federal election-campaign laws.
Court documents said Mr. Chung also sought to launder donations to Sen. John Kerry's 1996 re-election campaign in Massachusetts.
-- Continued from Front Page --
Mr. Chung is expected to enter a guilty plea in the case on Monday, according to lawyers close to the case. The charges were listed in a criminal information filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
The guilty plea, the sources said, appears to be part of an agreement with prosecutors for Mr. Chung's cooperation in the investigation of campaign-finance abuses during the 1996 elections. He is accused of violating the Federal Election Campaign Act by exceeding the statutory limit on contributions and conspiring to cause donations in the names of others.
The charges focus on two fund-raisers: for President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore in Century City, Calif., on Sept. 21, 1995; and a Sept. 9, 1996, fund-raiser for Mr. Kerry in Beverly Hills, Calif.
The longtime Democratic supporter and friend of President Clinton's once was described by a White House national security aide as a "hustler" seeking to turn high-level government contacts into business opportunities. But Mr. Chung still managed to visit the White House 51 times and give $366,000 to Democrats between 1994 and 1996. Twenty of those visits occurred after he had been described as a hustler.
Mr. Chung gave Margaret A. Williams, the first lady's chief of staff, the $50,000 check on March 9, 1995, raising questions of whether she violated federal law forbidding White House staffers to solicit or accept donations on government property. She denied in testimony before a Senate committee that she had violated the law, saying she took the check and immediately forwarded it to the Democratic National Committee.
Mrs. Williams also said she did not recall telling an assistant, Evan Ryan, that the donation would help get Mr. Chung in to see the president. Miss Ryan told House investigators during an Aug. 20, 1997, deposition that she told Mrs. Williams that Mr. Chung wanted to meet with the president along with six executives from Chinese government-controlled companies and was hoping to see Mr. Clinton give his weekly radio address.
On the same day Mr. Chung handed over the check, he and the businessmen showed up at Democratic Party headquarters to meet DNC Chairman Don Fowler. Two days later, he and the businessmen attended the president's weekly radio address in the Oval Office and posed with the first lady for a picture.
Mr. Chung, a Taiwan-born businessman who owns a fax company in California, has said he was told by Miss Ryan that Mrs. Clinton was looking for help paying off $80,000 in Christmas party bills. Congressional investigators have sought to ask Mr. Chung how he knew about the White House bills and to question him on other contacts he had with administration or DNC officials.
Congressional investigators believe Mr. Chung may have funneled campaign cash from China to the Democratic Party. Senate investigators said he had only $10,000 in his account when he gave the $50,000 check to Mrs. Williams, but received a wire transfer a few days later for $150,000 from the Bank of China.
Meanwhile, Yogesh Gandhi, suspected of being an illegal conduit for $325,000 in foreign contributions to the Democratic Party, was arrested Wednesday by the FBI in California on unrelated charges as he prepared to fly home to India.
The Justice Department said Mr. Gandhi was taken into custody at his home in Walnut Creek, Calif. He appeared before a U.S. magistrate in San Francisco on a mail-fraud charge accusing him of obtaining corporate American Express cards for himself and his wife, Kristi Marshall, in 1995 by forging a co-worker's name on the application.
An affidavit by FBI agent Ramyar Tabatabaian, a member of the Justice Department's campaign-finance task force, said police in Hayward, Calif., learned that Mr. Gandhi had a United Airlines ticket to leave at noon Thursday from San Francisco to New Delhi, by way of New York and London.
NEWSWEEK: Congressional Documents Show Kerry Met With Key 1996 Foreign-Money Scandals Figure Johnny Chung
NEW YORK, Feb. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Congressional documents obtained by Newsweek show that Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry met and personally corresponded with Johnny Chung, a central figure in the foreign-money scandals of 1996, prior to Chung's throwing Kerry a Beverly Hills fund-raiser. Kerry has previously maintained that his first meeting with Chung was at the September 9, 1996, event, reports Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff in the February 9 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, February 2). Chung, who visited the Clinton White House 49 times, eventually pleaded guilty to funneling $28,000 in illegal contributions to the campaigns of Kerry and Bill Clinton.
In the summer of 1996 Kerry, who was locked in a tough re-election fight, was told that a generous potential contributor wanted to visit his Capitol Hill office. The donor was Chung, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur, who brought along some friends, including Liu Chaoying, a Hong Kong businesswoman later found by Federal investigators to be a lieutenant colonel in China's People's Liberation Army and vice president of a Chinese-government-owned aerospace firm.
Told that Liu was interested in getting one of her companies listed on the U.S. Stock exchange, Kerry's aides immediately faxed over a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The next day, Liu and Chung were ushered into a private briefing with a senior SEC official. Within weeks, Chung returned the favor: On Sept. 9 he threw Kerry a fund-raiser at a Beverly Hills hotel, raking in $10,000 for the senator's re-election campaign. According to bank records and Chung's congressional testimony, the campaign contributions came out of $300,000 in overseas wire transfers sent on orders from the chief of Chinese military intelligence -- and routed through a Hong Kong bank account controlled by Liu.
There was never any suggestion that Kerry knew about the dubious origins of Chung's largesse. Still, the appearance that the senator had played a cynical cash-for-favors game forced him to play damage control. In January 1998 he told the Boston Herald that the timing of the SEC meeting and the subsequent fund-raiser was "totally coincidental" and "entirely staff driven." He said the Beverly Hills event had been set up by a professional fund-raiser, and that he had never even met Chung until the night of the event. But congressional documents obtained by Newsweek seem to tell a different story.
"Dear Johnny, It was a great pleasure to have met you last week," Kerry told Chung in a handwritten note dated July 31, 1996. "Barbara [a Kerry fund-raiser] told me of your willingness to help me with my campaign...It means a lot to have someone like you on my team as I face the toughest race of my career." That same day the Kerry fund-raiser faxed a memo to Chung that read, in part: "The following are two ways in which you can be helpful to John." No. 1 was "Host an event in L.A. on Saturday, Sept. 9th." (A Kerry spokesman acknowledged that the senator may have met with Chung prior to the fund-raiser, but not in his Senate office.)
Kerry, who routinely attacks the president for his ties to big-dollar donors, championed campaign-finance reform, and refused money from corporate or labor PACs. But over the years, reports the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, Kerry has raised more than $30 million for his Senate campaigns. A good portion has come from industries with an interest in the committees on which Kerry has a seat-including more than $3 million from financial firms (Kerry serves on the Senate Finance Committee).
Though he has shunned PAC donations, which are limited to $5,000 apiece, the senator in 2001 formed a fund-raising group called the Citizen Soldier Fund, which brought in more than $1.2 million in unregulated "soft money." Kerry pledged he would limit individual donations to $10,000. But in late 2002, just before new federal laws banning soft money took effect, Kerry quietly lifted the ceiling and took all the cash he could get. In the month before the election, the fund raised nearly $879,000-included $27,500 from wireless telecom firms such as T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon. That same month, Kerry cosponsored a bill to overturn a judge's ruling and permit the wireless firms to bid on billions of dollars' worth of wireless airwaves.
Why did Kerry abandon his own rules about contribution limits? "This was just before the election, and it was clear the Democrats needed all their resources to fight the Bush money machine," says Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. Kerry spread the windfall strategically. More than a third of the fund's contributions went to just three states critical to a senator plotting a run for the White House: Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
It is clear that her financial affairs have to secret or she, in effect, would be criminally testifying against herself. So, her concealing this Chinese money is constitutionally protected and no voter should, therefore, hold the illegal activities that she may be hiding against her or, especially, her current husband or the rest of the dems.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.But, here's Jean Keri the evening of November 2nd ...
Wouldn't this be considered outsourcing?
(CNSNews.com) - A senior U.S. government official has told CNSNews.com that the 1995 memo written by former Assistant Attorney General Jamie Gorelick and currently at issue in the 9/11 Commission's investigation of U.S. intelligence failures, also created "a roadblock" to the probe of the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign fundraising scandal.
The memo's relevance in the investigation of the fundraising scandal has received scant attention in the media, but four different sources, including the government official, have explained and corroborated details of the connection for CNSNews.com.
The CNSNews.com sources question whether the guidelines purportedly put in place by Gorelick in 1995 for Justice Department investigations were actually intended to shield President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and top Democratic campaign fundraisers from the subsequent congressional investigations of the illegal fundraising activities.
However, there appears to be no evidence at this point that the Gorelick memo was written for that express purpose.
From above -
The charges focus on two fund-raisers: for President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore in Century City, Calif., on Sept. 21, 1995; and a Sept. 9, 1996, fund-raiser for Mr. (John Effin') Kerry in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Is Gorelick just another John FF Kerry campaign hack? Sure looks like it...
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