Congressional Record, Volume 144 Issue 59 (Tuesday, May 12, 1998)

[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 59 (Tuesday, May 12, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H3054-H3058]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

QUESTION OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I rise to a question of personal
privilege.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will state his question of
privilege.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, the question of privilege deals
with statements made in three editorials published in newspapers within
the last week. The editorials contain statements which reflect directly
on my reputation and integrity and specifically allege deceptive
actions on my part and impugn my character and motive.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair has examined the press accounts
which serve as the basis of the gentleman from Indiana's question of
personal privilege and is satisfied that the gentleman states a proper
question of personal privilege.
Therefore, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for
1 hour.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may
consume.
Mr. Speaker, I want to tell my colleagues that I regret having to
take this time out of our very busy schedule. I will not take the whole
hour, but I think it is extremely important that the issues I am going
to talk about be made available to my colleagues and to anyone else who
is interested.
I rise today to take a point of personal privilege and to discuss the
Committee on Government Reform and Oversight's investigation into
illegal campaign contributions and other crimes. My conduct as chairman
has been criticized by many of my Democratic colleagues. Those
criticisms have been echoed in the press so I am taking this point of
personal privilege to lay out for the American people the facts about
this investigation.
The fact is that this committee has been subjected to a level of
stonewalling and obstruction that has never been seen by a
congressional investigation in the history of this country. This
investigation has been stonewalled by the White House. This
investigation has been stonewalled by the Democratic National
Committee. This committee has seen over 90 witnesses, 90, either take
the fifth amendment or flee the country to avoid testifying, more than
90.
The fact that all of these people have invoked their fifth amendment
right to avoid self-incrimination is a pretty strong indication that a
lot of crimes have been committed. Tomorrow the committee will vote on
immunity for four witnesses, all of whom have previously invoked their
right against self-incrimination. The Democrats on the Committee on
Government Reform and Oversight have voted once to block immunity and
keep these witnesses from testifying. I hope that tomorrow they will
reconsider and vote to allow this investigation to move forward as it
should.
This investigation has seen enough obstruction and enough
stonewalling for a lifetime. Before tomorrow's vote, I want to lay out
for the American people and my colleagues what has happened in this
investigation over the last year, the stalling and the delaying tactics
that have been used against us and what has brought us to this point. I
want to give a comprehensive summary of events so I am not going to
yield to my colleagues during this speech.
I became chairman of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight
in January of 1997. The President said he would give his full
cooperation to all congressional investigations of illegal foreign
fund-raising, including ours. So why are we conducting this
investigation? Because there is very strong evidence that crimes were
committed.
Let us take a look at some of the allegations that compelled us to
begin this investigation: that the DNC had accepted millions of dollars
in illegal foreign campaign contributions; that $3 million of the $4.5
million in contributions attributed to John Huang had to be returned
because of suspicions about their origins; that the Chinese Government
had developed and implemented a plan to influence the elections in the
United States of America; that Charlie Trie, a friend of the
President's from Arkansas, had funneled close to $700,000 in
contributions associated with a Taiwanese cult to the President's legal
defense fund; that Charlie Trie's Macao-based benefactor had wired him
in excess of $1 million from overseas banks; that Charlie Trie was
behind roughly $600,000 in suspicious contributions to the Democratic
National Committee; that Pauline Kanchanalak and her family funneled a
half a million dollars to the Democratic National Party from Thailand;
that Chinese gun merchants, Cuban drug smugglers and Russian mob
figures were being invited to intimate White House events with the
President in exchange for campaign contributions; that the former
associate Attorney General received $700,000 from friends and
associates of the President, including $100,000 from the Riady family
at a time when he was supposed to be cooperating with a criminal
investigation.
These are serious allegations about serious crimes. The Justice
Department recently brought indictments against three of these
individuals and a fourth, Johnny Chung has pled guilty.
In January 1997, I sent letters to the White House requesting copies
of all documents relating to this investigation. I asked for documents
regarding John Huang, Charlie Trie, White House fund-raisers, et
cetera. I gave the White House a chance to cooperate. Chairman Clinger,
who preceded me, had written to the White House in October of 1996, and
requested all documents regarding John Huang. Press reports had
indicated that the White House had already assembled these documents
and had them in boxes at the White House before the end of 1996.
The entire month of February passed and we received only a trickle of
documents from the White House. In March it was clear that the White
House was not going to comply voluntarily. The President had offered
his cooperation at the beginning of the year, but the White House
refused to turn over documents to the committee. The White House
campaign of stalling had begun. So I issued a subpoena for the
documents. I held a meeting with the President's new White House
counsel, Mr. Charles Ruff. Mr. Ruff assured me that the President would
not assert executive privilege over any of the documents. The White
House continued to resist turning over documents despite

[[Page H3055]]

the lawful subpoena that we sent to them.
Despite the earlier assurances, they told us they intended to claim
executive privilege, even though they had said previously the President
would not on over 60 documents that were relevant to the fund-raising
scandal. It had always been White House policy not to claim executive
privilege whenever personal wrongdoing or potential criminal conduct
was being investigated. President Clinton's own counsel, Lloyd Cutler,
had reiterated this policy early in the Clinton administration. But now
President Clinton was using executive privilege to block our
investigation.
The month of April passed and little or no progress had been made in
getting the documents we called for in our subpoena. This was more than
four months after my first document request had been sent to the White
House.
In May, I was compelled to schedule a committee meeting to hold White
House counsel Charles Ruff in contempt of Congress. More than four
months had passed since I asked for the President's cooperation in
producing documents and there had been nothing but stalling and more
stalling. It was only with this sword hanging over their heads that the
White House finally began to make efforts to comply with our subpoena.
Mr. Ruff agreed to turn over all documents required by the subpoena
within 6 weeks. He also agreed to allow committee attorneys to review
documents on their privilege log to determine if the committee needed
to have them. We reviewed those documents. We did need many of them.
After months of stalling, we finally got some of them. By June, Mr.
Ruff provided me with a letter stating that the White House had and I
quote, to the best of his knowledge, end of quote, turned over every
document in their possession required by the subpoena. We would find
out later that that was not true.

All the while we were struggling to get documents from the White
House, I was subjected to a steady stream of mudslinging and vicious
personal attacks from Democratic operatives and others close to the
President. The DNC, which at the time was resisting complying with our
subpoena, was spending thousands of dollars conducting opposition
research on my background to try to intimidate me. They produced a
scurrilous 20-page report detailing every trip I had ever taken, the
contributions I had received over the years, my financial disclosure
statements and anything else they could find.
This document, which made outrageous and untrue accusations against
me, was faxed around to reporters in an effort to drum up negative
publicity about me and intimidate me. So much for cooperation with a
legitimate congressional campaign investigation.
In March, the week my committee's budget was to be voted on by the
House, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee
made a slanderous accusation that I shook him down for campaign
contributions. His accusation was printed on the front page of the
Washington Post. His actions, which are completely untrue and absurd on
their face, became the subject of a Justice Department investigation.

{time} 1645

As it turns out, this individual, Mark Siegel, was a former Carter
White House aide, a former DNC executive director, a Democratic fund-
raiser and a Democratic lobbyist. More importantly, it became known
later that he is a close friend and business associate of then-White
House attorney Lanny Davis.
His accusations were clearly politically motivated and timed to hurt
the chances for approval of our budget for the investigation. So much
for cooperation from the Democrats.
Other sleazy accusations were being dished out to the press by
anonymous Democratic agents. One reporter from my home State received
derogatory information about me in an unmarked manila envelope without
any return address. One Washington reporter got an anonymous phone call
and was told to go to a phone booth, a phone booth in the Rayburn
Building, and look in the back of the phone book. He went to that phone
booth and found an envelope of defamatory information about me glued to
the inside of the back of the phone book.
Talk about cloak and dagger. This is the type of smear campaign that
every committee chairman who has attempted to conduct oversight of the
White House has been subjected to.
They attempted to smear the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Leach), they
attempted to smear Chairman, former Congressman Bill Clinger, they
attempted to smear Senator D'Amato, they attempted to smear Senator
Fred Thompson, they even attempted to smear FBI Director Louis Freeh
when he sought to convince the Attorney General to appoint an
independent counsel. And, of course, Mr. Starr has been smeared, and
everybody else that has investigated any aspect of the White House.
What does this kind of behavior by the Democratic Party say to the
American people? Is this cooperation? Were these smear campaigns
orchestrated by the White House? That is something the American people
have a right to know.
In February of 1997, my staff learned, by reading The Washington
Post, that the White House had sought a briefing from the FBI about the
evidence it had gathered about Chinese efforts to infiltrate our
political system and to affect the outcomes of elections. For obvious
reasons, the FBI resisted giving such a briefing. The criminal
investigation potentially implicated members of the White House staff.
I learned from discussions with FBI Director Louis Freeh that at a
time he was traveling in the Middle East, senior officials at the
Justice Department attempted to provide this information about the
ongoing criminal investigation to the White House, that was part of the
investigation, a move that the FBI adamantly opposed.
According to Director Freeh, when his staff learned that the Justice
Department lawyers were planning on giving this information to the
White House, Director Freeh's chief of staff called him on his airplane
halfway around the world in a last-ditch effort to stop the transfer of
this information to the White House, which could have potentially
jeopardized the investigation. Director Freeh was forced to make an
emergency phone call to the Attorney General from his plane in the
Middle East to intervene and stop that process.
When the Attorney General testified before our committee in December,
she told a different version of events. She testified that she
initiated the call to Director Freeh on his airplane to consult with
him about providing the information to the White House. However, when
Director Freeh testified the next day, he confirmed that it was he who
initiated the call, after his staff warned him that the FBI was being
circumvented so that sensitive information could be provided to the
White House against the FBI's wishes.
Now, let us go back to the White House. The stonewalling and the
obstruction from the White House did not stop following our agreement
with Mr. Ruff, the President's chief counsel. The letter I received in
June of 1997 from Mr. Ruff assured me that, quote, to the best of his
knowledge, all documents relevant to our investigation had been
provided to the committee. Unfortunately, these assurances were hollow.
They were false.
Throughout the summer, boxes of newly discovered documents dribbled
into the committee offices. Often, when the documents contained
damaging revelations, they were leaked to the press before being
provided to the committee. On one occasion, on a Friday night, we got
about 12 boxes of documents. We did not even open them until the next
Monday. But in the Saturday morning papers there was information that
was in those boxes in the papers, and the White House was accusing us
of leaking the information when we had not even opened the boxes.
When this happened, the documents were normally given to reporters
late on a Friday or over a busy weekend to try to deaden their impact
on the American people.
It was not unusual to receive documents pertaining to a White House
or a DNC employee shortly after that employee was deposed. This forced
us, on a continuing basis, to consider redeposing witnesses, costing
additional time and money.

[[Page H3056]]

In the Senate, Senator Thompson faced the same obstacles. Last July,
the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs heard 2 days of testimony
from DNC Finance Director Richard Sullivan. The evening following
Sullivan's testimony, after he testified, the White House delivered
several boxes of documents shedding new light on Sullivan's activities.
The chairman of the committee in the other body was so infuriated that
he canceled his agreement allowing the White House to provide documents
voluntarily and he issued his first subpoena to the White House.
On August 1, more Richard Sullivan documents turned up at the
Democratic National Committee. The DNC turned over several boxes of
memos and handwritten notes from the filing cabinet in Sullivan's
office.
The idea that the DNC could have overlooked drawers and drawers of
relevant documents right in Richard Sullivan's office strains
credibility. The Senate was forced to redepose Mr. Sullivan.
The final straw came in October when the White House videotapes were
discovered. The White House had in its possession close to 100
videotapes of the President speaking and mingling with subjects of our
investigation at DNC fund-raisers and White House coffees. The
President could be seen at the White House fund-raisers with John
Huang, James Riady, Pauline Kanchanalak, Charlie Trie, and many others.
In one tape the President could be seen introduced at a fund-raiser
to Charlie Trie and several foreign businessmen as ``The Trie Team.''
This was serious evidence that the White House had withheld from
Congress and the Justice Department investigation for over 6 months.
Despite the fact our subpoena clearly ordered the production of any
relevant videotapes, the White House had, for 6 months, failed to
reveal their existence. It was only under pressure from a Senate
investigator, who had received a tip from a source, that the
White House admitted to the existence of the tapes. In other words,
they did not turn over the fund-raising tapes until their hand was
caught in the cookie jar.

Charles Ruff has said publicly that he was informed of the existence
of the tapes on Wednesday, October 1. Now, remember this. The
President's counsel said he was informed of the existence of the tapes
on Wednesday, October 1. He met with Attorney General Janet Reno on
Thursday, October 2, the day after he found out about the tapes. He did
not inform the Attorney General at that meeting that the tapes existed
and that they had not been turned over to the Justice Department. I
believe he had an obligation to do so.
Now, this was a critical week, because the Attorney General was in
the process of deciding whether to seek the appointment of an
independent counsel and she had to make her decision on Friday, October
3. So the President's counsel knew about the tapes on the 1st, he
talked to the Attorney General on the 2nd, she had to make her decision
on the 3rd, but he did not tell her about it. And so she made the
decision not to appoint an independent counsel. Had she known about
those tapes, her decision might have been otherwise.
On Friday, the Attorney General released a letter declining to
appoint an independent counsel. The tapes were not released until the
Justice Department--until the weekend. Another stonewalling. In other
words, Mr. Ruff had a face-to-face meeting with the Attorney General.
He failed to disclose to her that the fund-raising videotapes existed
and allowed her to make a very important decision on an independent
counsel without having any knowledge of them.
That is just wrong. It is obstruction of our investigation and all
these investigations.
I called Charles Ruff and the other attorneys from the White House
counsel's office to testify before our committee in November, to answer
for their failure to produce these tapes. Under questioning from a
committee attorney, White House Deputy Counsel Cheryl Mills admitted
that she and White House Counsel Jack Quinn had withheld from the
committee for 1 year an important document related to the investigation
of political uses of the White House database.
The document in question was a page of notes taken by a White House
staffer that indicated the President's desire to integrate the White
House database with the DNC's database, which is not legal. This
document had a direct bearing on the subcommittee's investigation.
Cheryl Mills admitted that she had kept the document in a file in her
office for over a year, based on a legal sleight of hand. Her behavior
in this instance was another in a long string of incidents that
reflected the White House's desire to stall and delay congressional
investigations of its alleged misconduct. This kind of behavior is
inexcusable for a White House attorney and a public servant.
It was not the only time the subcommittee has faced obstructionism.
The White House official most directly responsible for developing the
controversial database was Marsha Scott. Committee attorneys had to
attempt to depose Ms. Scott on three separate occasions to overcome her
refusal to answer questions.
This April, Ms. Scott was subpoenaed to attend a deposition. She
arrived for the deposition, began to answer questions, and then
abruptly got up and walked out of the deposition. This committee has
never seen a witness who was under subpoena walk out in the middle of a
deposition.
The subcommittee chairman, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. McIntosh),
was forced to call an emergency meeting of the subcommittee at 8
o'clock that night to force Ms. Scott to return and answer the
questions.
This is typical of the kinds of obstruction this committee has
encountered while dealing with this White House.
The White House strategy was accurately described in a recent New
York Post editorial as ``The Four Ds: Deny, Delay, Denigrate and
Distract.'' It appears that the White House's game plan has been to
stall and obstruct legitimate investigations for as long as possible
and then criticize the length of the investigations, all the while
attacking the investigators.
It has been fairly noted by a number of leading editorial pages that
if the President and his subordinates would simply cooperate and tell
the truth, these investigations could be wrapped up quickly. The
Committee on Government Reform and Oversight continued to have White
House documents dribble in as late as last December, 6 months after
Charles Ruff had certified they had given us everything.
Since January of last year, I have been seeking information from the
Justice Department about its investigations into allegations that the
Government of Vietnam may have attempted to bribe Commerce Secretary
Ron Brown to influence policy on the normalization of relations with
Vietnam, even though we had not had complete reporting on the 2,300 or
2,400 POWs and MIAs left behind.
The New York Times reported that the Justice Department had received
evidence of international wire transfers related to the case, that
there was money transferred from Hanoi to another bank. There was
information in the papers about that. Despite the fact that the Justice
Department had closed the case, they were resisting providing any
information to my committee.
On Tuesday, July 8, because the Justice Department would not give me
the information, I sent a subpoena to the Attorney General and the
Justice Department demanding this information.
Now, get this: 3 days later, after I sent a subpoena to the Attorney
General, on Friday, July 11, my campaign had an FBI agent walk in and
give us a subpoena for 5 years of my campaign records. Although Mr.
Siegel had made his allegations against me in March, there had been no
signs of any investigative activity within the Justice Department until
I sent a subpoena to the Attorney General about Mr. Brown and that FBI
report.
Was this a case of retaliation? That is a question the American
people have a right to have answered, and I think I do, too.
This committee has faced obstructions from the White House. That is
obvious. It is also true that this committee has faced serious
obstructions from other governments in this world.
We tried to send a team of investigators to China and Hong Kong
earlier this year. There are important witnesses that need to be
interviewed to find out who is behind major wire

[[Page H3057]]

transfers of money that wound up being funneled into campaigns in this
country. The Chinese Government turned us down flat. They would not
give visas to our investigators.
We attempted to get information from the Bank of China about who
originated the wire transfers of hundreds of thousands of dollars to
Charlie Trie, Ng Lap Seng and others. The Bank of China told us they
are an arm of the Chinese Government and they would not comply with our
subpoena.
I wrote to the President and asked for his assistance to break
through this logjam with the Chinese Government. We have received no
answer and no assistance whatsoever from the White House.
My friends on the Democratic side of the aisle are fond of
complaining about the number of subpoenas I have issued. For the
record, I have issued just over 600 since the investigation began a
year-and-a-half ago. There is a very simple reason that I have been
compelled to issue that many subpoenas. This committee has received
absolutely no cooperation from more than 90 key witnesses and
participants in efforts to funnel foreign money into U.S. campaigns.
And many of these people are personal friends of the President, many of
these people worked in the White House, and they have taken the Fifth
or fled the country.
More than 90 witnesses have either taken the Fifth to avoid
incriminating themselves or fled the country to avoid testifying
because they possibly are involved in criminal activity.
The Justice Department did not receive much cooperation either.
Director Freeh, when he testified before the committee last December,
told us that they had issued over 1,000 subpoenas from the FBI.

{time} 1700

Fifty-three people have taken the fifth. These include Webb Hubbell,
the President's hand-picked Associate Attorney General; John Huang, the
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce, who was in the White House over
100 times during the President's first term; and Mark Middleton, a
high-level aide in the office of the White House Chief of Staff.
I want to be clear about what this means. High-level appointees of
the President have exercised their fifth amendment rights against self-
incrimination in criminal investigations, in crimes. These people do
not want to testify because they do not want to admit to the commission
of any crime that they may have been involved in. And these are people
that have worked in the White House close to the President, his
friends.
Thirty-eight witnesses have either fled the country or refused to
make themselves available to be interviewed in their countries or their
residence. There has never before in the history of this country been a
congressional investigation that has had to investigate a scandal that
is so broad and so international in scope. There has never before been
a congressional investigation that has seen and had over 90 witnesses
refuse to cooperate or flee the country.
The fact that we have had so many non-cooperating witnesses is the
reason that we have had to issue so many subpoenas. For instance,
Charlie Trie, even though he has returned to the United States, has
refused to cooperate with the committee. To overcome this problem, we
had to issue 117 subpoenas to banks, phone companies, businesses, and
other individuals to get information that Mr. Trie could have provided
himself to us and to the committee. We have had to issue 60 subpoenas
to attempt to get information about Ted Sioeng.
Ted Sioeng and his family have given $400,000 to the Democrat
National Committee. They have also given $150,000 to Republican causes.
Not only has Ted Sioeng fled the country, but more than a dozen people
associated with them have left as well. I mean, they are all heading
for the hills. If Ted Sioeng would come back to the United States and
cooperate with this investigation, we would not have to issue all of
these subpoenas.
Eighty percent of the subpoenas I have issued have been targeted to
get information about half a dozen individuals who have been implicated
in this scandal and who have taken the fifth amendment to avoid
testifying.
Just to be clear, more than 90 people have taken the fifth amendment
or fled the country. That is scandalous. It has never happened before
in the history of this country. Friends of the President, friends of
the administration, contributors, leaders from other countries, have
all headed for the hills. This is unprecedented. This should be a clear
indication to people of the extent of the lawbreaking that occurred
during the last campaign.
At this point, I would like to say a few things about the release of
the Webster Hubbell tapes, which we read about in the papers last week.
First, Webster Hubbell was the Associate Attorney General of the United
States. He was hand-picked by President Clinton to serve as one of the
highest law enforcement officers in our land. Within a year, he was
forced to resign in disgrace because of a criminal investigation into
fraud at his law firm. He was eventually convicted and served 18 months
in prison.
Between the time he resigned, between the time he left the Justice
Department and he was convicted, about 6 or 7 months later, he received
$700,000 in payments from friends and associates of the President's for
doing little or no work; and many people believe that was hush money.
One hundred thousand dollars came from the Riady family in Indonesia,
owners of the Lippo Group. This payment came within a few days of 10
meetings at the White House, some including the President himself,
involving the President, John Huang, James Riady, and Webster Hubbell.
Serious allegations have been made that this $700,000 was hush money
meant to keep Mr. Hubbell silent. A criminal investigation is underway.
And Mr. Hubbell was just indicted for failure to pay almost $900,000 in
taxes.
The American people have a right to know what happened. They have a
right to know why Mr. Hubbell received this money and what he did for
it. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and people do not shell out
$700,000 for nothing. We would expect the President's hand-picked
appointee to a powerful Justice Department position would be the first
to volunteer to cooperate with the congressional investigation.
Instead, Mr. Hubbell, a close friend of the President, former leader
at the Justice Department, has taken the fifth amendment and remains
silent. This has forced us to seek other sources of information. And
that is why I subpoenaed the prison tapes of Mr. Hubbell's phone
conversations.
Out of 150 hours of conversations, my staff prepared just over 1 hour
for release to the public, private conversations that had nothing to do
with our investigation, and we screened those out. What was contained
in that hour of conversations raises troubling questions. Given the
seriousness of the allegations, this material deserves to be on the
public record.
On these tapes, we hear Mrs. Hubbell say that she fears that she will
lose her job at the Interior Department if Mr. Hubbell takes actions
that will hurt the Clintons. We heard Mrs. Hubbell say that she feels
she is being squeezed by the White House. Webster Hubbell states, after
she says that, that ``I guess I must roll over just one more time.''
``Roll over one more time.'' These statements raise very disturbing
questions about the conduct of the White House and the conduct of the
Hubbells. The American people have a right to know the answers.
Let me say a couple things about the charges of selective editing.
Mistakes were made in the editing process. As chairman, I take
responsibility for those mistakes. But they were just that, innocent
mistakes. In the process of editing 149 hours of personal
conversations, the staff cut out a couple of paragraphs that should
have been left in. Here are a few points to be kept in mind. We are not
talking about transcripts. What were prepared were logs of the
conversations, logs, summaries of information on the tapes. They were
not verbatim transcripts and they were never identified as such. They
were logs of where these conversations came from out of the 150 hours
of tapes that was condensed on to one.
Exculpatory statements about both Mrs. Clinton and other Clinton
administration officials were left in the logs. In one case, an
exculpatory statement by Mr. Hubbell about Mrs. Clinton was underlined
to highlight it. The tapes were never altered. This charge has

[[Page H3058]]

been repeated time and time again by the Democrats and it is false. The
tapes were not altered.
Once the tapes were made public, reporters were allowed to listen to
and record the appropriate sections of the tapes in their entirety.
These sections included the statements about Mrs. Clinton and Mr.
Hubbell that have been complained about. How can anyone argue that
there was an intent to deceive when reporters were allowed to listen to
the comments I have been accused of deleting?

Finally, in an effort to end once and for all these charges of
selective editing, I have released the tapes of these 50 conversations
in their entirety, even though I did not want to because there is
personal stuff in there that I did not think should be in the public
domain, but the integrity of the investigation had to be maintained.
What I find most unfortunate is that this incident has detracted from
the important facts about the Hubbell tapes that it appears that Mr.
Hubbell and his wife were under a great deal of pressure to keep their
mouths shut. This is something that absolutely must be investigated. It
is something that the American people absolutely have a right to know.
She felt she was being squeezed by the White House, and he felt he had
to roll over one more time. He had to roll over one more time.
And when we have over 90 people fleeing the country or taking the
fifth amendment, we have to wonder if Mr. Hubbell is only one of a
number that are scared to talk, that are afraid to say anything because
of pressure from the White House.
This brings us to tomorrow's committee meeting. Tomorrow we will try
to break through this stone wall one more time by granting immunity to
four witnesses. The Justice Department has agreed to immunity. The
Justice Department has agreed to immunity. They have been thoroughly
consulted. The Justice Department has already immunized two of these
witnesses themselves. There is no reason to oppose immunity. Yet 19
Democrats on the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight voted in
lock step against immunity. They voted to prevent these witnesses from
telling the truth to the American people.
I want to tell the American people a little bit about who these
witnesses are. Two of these witnesses were employees of Johnny Chung.
They were involved in his conduit contribution schemes, bringing money
from illegal sources into the DNC. They were involved in setting up
many of his meetings at the White House and with other government
officials.
Kent La is a very important witness. He is a business associate of
Ted Sioeng, one of the people that had fled the country. He is the U.S.
distributor of Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes. Ted Sioeng has a major
stake in these cigarettes. This is the best selling brand of cigarettes
in China. This company is owned by the Communist Chinese Government. It
is the third largest cigarette selling in the world. This company is
owned by the Chinese Government, and it is a convenient way to funnel
money into campaigns in the United States by Ted Sioeng, Kent La, and
others.
Ted Sioeng and his associates gave $400,000 in contributions to the
Democrat National Committee. Of that amount, Kent La gave $50,000. Was
that money from Red Pagoda cigarettes from the Chinese Communist
Government? We need to find out. The American people have a right to
know.
Every witness that we have spoken to says that ``If you want to
understand Ted Sioeng, you have got to talk to Kent La.'' And that is
one of the people we want to talk to, but we have to get immunity for
him first. Kent La has invoked the fifth amendment. He will not testify
without immunity. But the Democrats on our committee will not grant him
immunity. The Democrats have voted to block immunity. I cannot, for the
life of me, understand why they want to do that.
This is not a partisan issue. Ted Sioeng did not just give money to
Democrats, he gave to both sides. He gave $150,000 to Republican causes
as well as the Democrats. So this is not a partisan issue with Kent La
and Ted Sioeng. It seems very clear that most of this half a million
dollars donated by Ted Sioeng and his associates came from profits of
selling Chinese cigarettes around the world. Kent La is the one
individual who can tell us if this is true or not. I do not understand
why my colleagues want to keep this witness from testifying and protect
a major Communist Chinese cigarette company, especially when the
gentleman from California, who has been such a forceful advocate of
reducing smoking here in the United States, is one of those voting
against immunity.
We have a number of good members on my committee on both sides of the
aisle. I think we have conscientious members, both Democrat and
Republican, who are outraged by some of the things that have happened
during the last election. I hope all of my colleagues are thinking long
and hard about their votes, and I hope that they will reconsider and
support immunity tomorrow.
Now, in conclusion, I have tried throughout this discussion to try to
make clear to the American people and my colleagues that this is an
investigation that has faced countless obstacles, stone walls. We have
faced obstruction from the White House. We have faced stalling from the
Democrat National Committee. We have faced non-cooperation from foreign
governments. We have had over 90 people take the fifth amendment or
flee the country because they did not want to testify because of
criminal activity.
However, we will continue. There are very serious allegations of
crimes that have been committed, and the American people have a right
to know. I hope that tomorrow we will start to tear down the stone wall
by granting immunity to these four witnesses and getting on with the
investigation. None of this should be covered up. The American people
have a very clear right to know if our government was compromised. They
have a right to know if foreign contributions influenced our foreign
policy, if it endangered our national defense. These are things the
American people have a right to know, and we are going to do our dead
level best to make sure they get that right and they get to know it.

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