from the 10/20 Washington Weekly (posted with permission) LIPPO SCANDAL UNFOLDS The White House Indonesia Connection It is more complicated than Whitewater. The money involved is (so far) less than the money involved in Whitewater. There are no dead bodies. Yet it is the scandal that is the talk of the town in Washington with two weeks to the election. Bill Clinton may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act by failing to register as a paid foreign agent for Mochtar Riady of the Indonesian Lippo Group. And he has certainly accepted illegal foreign campaign contributions. Newt Gingrich last week called it a far, far bigger scandal than Watergate. "This is the largest scandal to affect the presidency in the history of the United States." Bob Dole agreed, saying "In other countries, such habits of corruption are common. But they must never be allowed to change and distort our political system. We do not import corruption from other nations, we export our vision of democracy to the rest of the world." "Every day we have a new scandal involving the foreign corruption of America. Our elections are not for sale to some foreign influence or some foreign interest. This is the United States of America." Hold on. Beneath the surface we find how the Lippo connection ties into all the previous scandals of the Clinton administration. These are the undisputed facts: (*) Mochtar Riady is an ethnic Chinese banker in Jakarta. He started his financial empire with gun- and drug-running in the East Indies before World War II. (*) Mochtar Riday later formed the $6 billion Lippo Group, headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia. (*) John Huang, a top employee of Lippo Group was named assistant secretary of Commerce for international economic policy by Bill Clinton. John Huang last year left the White House to become vice chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee (*) Last month, the DNC returned an illegal $250,000 contribution handled by John Huang after the press revealed that it came from a South Korean company, Cheong Am. (*) Republicans are also calling on the party to return $425,000 in contributions from an Indonesian couple, Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata, with ties to Lippo Group. (*) A total of $140,000 were raised at a Buddhist temple in California by John Huang and Vice President Al Gore. A woman named Man Ya Shih associated with the temple has told the Wall Street Journal that she was given $5,000 in cash by a Democratic activist and asked to write a check for that amount to the DNC. That is money laundering. (*) A network of people and companies clustered around the Lippo conglomerate have contributed $200,000 to Clinton and the Democrats since 1992. (*) The president of Lippo Securities, Charles Dequeljoe, was appointed in December of 1994 by former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor to the Investment and Services Policy Advisory Committee. (*) In February of 1994, U.S. Trade Representative Kantor suspended a review of Indonesian human rights violations, allowing Indonesia to keep its trade privileges, worth over $600 million in sales to Indonesian companies. (*) The Indonesian government has led a war on East Timor that has cost the lives of an estimated 200,000 East Timorese. (*) Two East Timor dissidents won the Nobel Peace Prize a few weeks ago. (*) The Clinton administration has just approved the sale of F-16 fighter jets to the Indonesian government. (*) The Import-Export Bank has issued letters of credit for $900,000 to James Riady's Lippo Bank. The president of the taxpayer-financed Ex-Im bank is a Clinton appointee, Maria Luisa Haley. James Riady has also pushed Ex-Im Bank for U.S. government financing of a $1 billion project by Lippo to build a power plant in northern China. The plant constructor is a Little Rock unit of Entergy Corp. (*) Maria Luisa Haley is the ex-husband of John Haley who is a co-defendant of former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker in a case that involves a cable television franchise in Jarkarta set up by Rose Law Firm lawyer Joe Giroir and Lippo Group. (*) Moctar Riady, together with Jackson Stephens, once owned Worthen Bank in Little Rock. The bank financed Bill Clintons election campaigns, and bailed out the 1992 Presidential campaign of Bill Clinton with a three million dollar loan at a crucial juncture. (*) Worthen Bank invested in the Little Rock-based World Wide Travel that handled Clinton campaign travel, and was selected to take over all White House travel, a scheme that resulted in Travelgate. (*) Mack McLarty once worked at Worthen Bank, later worked for Entergy Corp., and now works in the White House, where he has been chief of staff. (*) A co-owner of Worthen Bank at that time was Joe Giroir, managing partner of the Rose Law Firm. The primary counsel for Worthen Bank was Rose Law Firm where Hillary Clinton, Webster Hubbell, and Vince Foster worked. (*) Joe Giroir, Hillary Clinton, and Vince Foster defended Stephens Inc. in a case that stemmed from a failed takeover effort involving the BCCI. (*) BCCI entered the American bank scene with the help of Democrat party insiders Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. They were later defended by Robert Fiske, Robert Bennett, and Jamie Gorelick. Jamie Gorelick is now in the Clinton Justice Department and is expected to become the next director of the CIA. Robert Bennett now defends Clinton against the charges by Paula Jones, and Robert Fiske was appointed by the Clinton Justice Department to investigate the death of Vince Foster. He concluded suicide. (*) Joe Giroir still represents Lippo and has brokered ventures between Lippo and Tyson Foods to improve sales of Tyson chicken in the Far East. (*) Between the time that Webster Hubbell resigned as Deputy Attorney General and the time he was sent to jail, he was paid $250,000 by the Lippo Group. During the same time frame he was cooperating with Kenneth Starr who hoped that Hubbell would implicate Bill Clinton in Whitewater-related crimes. Hubbell did not. Why should he? (*) Mochtar Riady created Lippo Finance & Investment Inc., an SBA-backed lending company in Little Rock with Vernon Weaver as chairman. Weaver is now Clinton's U.S. representative to the European Union. (*) The Los Angeles-based Lippo Bank has twice received cease- and-desist orders from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for violations of money-laundering statutes. Get the picture? Well, we said it was a complicated scandal. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. But the quid pro quos are there. Some would say that a criminal empire has taken over the U.S. Presidency. The House Judiciary Committee has begun an investigation and both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have called for the appointment of an Independent Counsel.