The paperback edition of Michael Isikoff's bestseller on the Lewinsky saga, Uncovering Clinton, has just hit the bookstores. It includes a freshly penned "Afterword" wherein interested readers can find the following remarkable account of how exactly Bill Clinton got elected president in the first place:
In the fall of 1999 . . . [a] House committee obtained copies of hundreds of pages of previously secret FBI debriefings of John Huang. . . . In these talks, Huang for the first time laid out the origins of the so-called Asian connection to the White House -- a story that actually began four years before the widely publicized abuses of the 1996 election. In August 1992, during a campaign trip to California, Clinton had taken a limousine ride with Huang's employer, James Riady, the billionaire chief of the Lippo Group. . . . Riady offered to pump $ 1 million into Clinton's presidential campaign. . . . Over the next several weeks, Riady made good on his pledge. Massive wire transfers began. As ultimately documented by federal investigators, hundreds of thousands of dollars from Lippo's bank accounts in Asia flowed to Lippo employees and Lippo-owned corporations in the United States. These employees and companies in turn then wrote contribution checks recommended by Clinton's campaign operatives in Little Rock. The contributions were in most cases doubly illegal: Not only did they come from a foreign source, but they were also funneled through "conduits" to disguise the true identity of the giver. Meanwhile, Riady and his wife also wrote large "soft money" checks under their own names -- but they were distributed to state parties around the country where the national press never noticed them. By the time election day came around, James Riady's Lippo Group -- a foreign corporation whose existence was virtually unknown in official Washington, much less to the American public -- had become the largest single financier of Clinton's campaign against President George Bush, dwarfing the donations of trial lawyers, labor unions and other traditional Democratic Party "soft money" givers.
That Clinton and his entourage kept all this hidden from the public for years is, at a minimum, an impressive testament to their ability to conceal from the public that which is politically awkward. For such a man, waving his finger at the public and denying an illicit sexual relationship with a young intern must have seemed small beer -- and nothing to cause undue anguish.