The New York Times

Thursday, October 7, 1999

ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Those Chinese Agents

WASHINGTON -- The Chinese Embassy here sent two of its senior commercial ministers to Capitol Hill last week to impugn the testimony of a Chinese citizen now resident in Arizona.

Jianwei Ding worked for a subsidiary of Cofco, the agricultural giant that also runs the big Chinese Cultural Center in Phoenix. He came to the House Reform and Oversight Committee with a charge that his former boss, Ning Yu -- now named Elizabeth Mann -- had a gift-giving relationship with the man who gives out visas at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Our State Department yanked out our visa-giver, but Ding's internal whistle-blowing did not sit well with his company's officers. They won a lawsuit against him and seek his deportation home, where his clues to kickbacks can be squelched.

"The embassy officials kept insisting that 'this bad man is a small potato,' " reports James Wilson, chief counsel to Dan Burton's committee, "but then pointed out, almost as a threat, that the company imports 18 million tons of corn and barley from the U.S."

China has registered not a peep of protest to Congress about inquiries into corrupt dealings in money and politics by Clinton friends Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung and John Huang. But curiously, Ding upsets them greatly, and the People's Republic is spending bundles on lawyer's fees to get our Immigration officials to reject asylum. (Over to you, Tony Lewis.)

Speaking of John Huang, who was the Indonesian Riady family's money man at the Commerce Department and the D.N.C.: President Clinton had good news for James Riady when he greeted him last month in Auckland. Reno Justice let Huang off with a fine and probation for his millions in illegal fund-raising. Now Janet Reno won't let the committee immunize him to get his testimony about higher-ups, pretending a "continuing espionage investigation" exists.

And what of Charlie Trie, Little Rock's man in Beijing? Over in the Senate, Fred Thompson's Oversight Committee heard from four F.B.I. agents assigned to the task force Reno used to block independent investigation of "the Asian connection" with the 1996 Clinton campaign.

The F.B.I. witnesses revealed that the cover-up crew at Reno Justice knew of the systematic destruction of subpoenaed evidence by Trie's assistant -- and refused for four months to allow agents to obtain a search warrant to seize remaining documents.

After a lawful Senate subpoena to Justice for the lead F.B.I. agent's notebook detailing this obstruction, 27 pages of Roberta Parker's notebook were destroyed inside Reno Justice. That's a Federal crime. Reno shrugged this scandal over to Marshall Jarrett, her in-house shoo-fly who can be trusted never to find the perp in their midst.

F.B.I. agents have testified how Justice deliberately impeded lines of inquiry into the White House. Senator Thompson, now deposing Justice witnesses, says: "Theirs was a hapless, incompetent, possibly corrupt investigation into Asian fund-raising. We're going into this now more deeply than Justice is."

China's contributions to Clinton went hand in hand with its espionage. Looking into that end is a new Senate task force headed by Arlen Specter, former Intelligence Committee chairman. He's interested in the technical transfers of ballistic-missile data by Loral and Hughes, companies headed by two big Clinton fund-raisers and trade influencers.

Today Senate Judiciary will vote to arm Specter's newly recruited team of serious investigators with subpoenas on Justice officials to find out what went into Reno's cozy plea bargains with Trie, Huang and Chung -- and why no espionage counts were included in the prosecution of Peter Lee.

In closed hearings next week, Specter's group will examine the Inspectors General of the C.I.A. and the Department of Energy, and customs officials critical of the dangerous sale of secrets. "Nobody's peeled back the covers," says the former Pennsylvania prosecutor. "I'm determined to do that."

Maybe he will. Maybe Thompson and Burton will flip over rocks as well. If Justice's stone wall cracks, Americans might yet discover the connection between unpunished Chinese illegal contributions and unpublished stories of Chinese espionage.