BOZELL & GRAHAM: Remember Bill Clinton's Asiagate Scandal?
The DNC was forced to return more than $2.8 million in illegal or inappropriate donations.
The use of the word "unprecedented" displays amnesia, or ignorance, or simply a rewrite of recent American history. Liberal journalists would like everyone to forget how then-President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee engaged in a blatant strategy to solicit illegal foreign contributions from Asian sources before the 1996 presidential election. Their contacts included Liu Chaoying, daughter of the senior commander of Red China's People's Liberation Army, who met with President Clinton.
The Washington Post reported in 1998, "Evidence gathered in federal surveillance intercepts has indicated that the Chinese government planned to increase China's influence in the U.S. political process in 1996." Doesn't that sound like a precedent?
After Clinton was easily re-elected, the DNC was forced to return more than $2.8 million in illegal or inappropriate donations. Almost 80 percent of that ill-gotten gain came from two sleazy Clinton-connected fundraisers, foreign nationals John Huang and Charles Yah Lin Trie. Few people remember this scandal because it was buried by those same news outlets that can't stop talking about Russia.
It's not as if they didn't know, either.
Twenty years ago this summer, Congress investigated this "Asiagate" plot while then-Sen. Fred Thompson's hearings produced one embarrassing detail after another about the Democrats. How did the press report these damning developments? They bad-mouthed the hearings as a waste of money and buried them under massive coverage of tabloid-ish stories of death — first, the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace in July, and then the accidental death of Princess Diana in August.
The DNC was forced to return more than $2.8 million in illegal or inappropriate donations.
The use of the word "unprecedented" displays amnesia, or ignorance, or simply a rewrite of recent American history. Liberal journalists would like everyone to forget how then-President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee engaged in a blatant strategy to solicit illegal foreign contributions from Asian sources before the 1996 presidential election. Their contacts included Liu Chaoying, daughter of the senior commander of Red China's People's Liberation Army, who met with President Clinton.
The Washington Post reported in 1998, "Evidence gathered in federal surveillance intercepts has indicated that the Chinese government planned to increase China's influence in the U.S. political process in 1996." Doesn't that sound like a precedent?
After Clinton was easily re-elected, the DNC was forced to return more than $2.8 million in illegal or inappropriate donations. Almost 80 percent of that ill-gotten gain came from two sleazy Clinton-connected fundraisers, foreign nationals John Huang and Charles Yah Lin Trie. Few people remember this scandal because it was buried by those same news outlets that can't stop talking about Russia.
It's not as if they didn't know, either.
Twenty years ago this summer, Congress investigated this "Asiagate" plot while then-Sen. Fred Thompson's hearings produced one embarrassing detail after another about the Democrats. How did the press report these damning developments? They bad-mouthed the hearings as a waste of money and buried them under massive coverage of tabloid-ish stories of death — first, the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace in July, and then the accidental death of Princess Diana in August.
