A prominent fund-raiser for the US Democratic Party, Trie Yah-lin (
Trie used the driver's license of his Little Rock secretary's husband to get Chien Chih-chong, the Taiwan chairman of TransCapitol International, into a White House dinner on Dec. 13, 1996, the Times said.
Chien "bore no similarity" to the Little Rock man, according to a prosecutor working on a task force created to look into whether foreign money interests attempted to influence US elections.
The incident, which federal officials consider a serious breach of presidential security, occurred days before Trie fled the US to avoid an investigation of his fund-raising activities with foreign donors, the paper noted.
US federal election law prohibits campaign contributions from foreign donors.
Trie pleaded guilty last May to election law violations and named a new source of secret foreign donations, the Times said.
According to the paper, Trie claimed that Tomy Winata, an Indonesian billionaire with financial links to the Indonesian army, gave him US$200,000 in travelers's checks. Trie then used a portion of that money to make illicit contributions to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and to compensate donors to Clinton's legal defense fund, the Times reported.
The paper said that another of Trie's major foreign donors included Suma Ching-hai (清海無上師), the spiritual leader of a Buddhist sect in Taiwan that is named after her. Suma allegedly gave Trie a bag containing US$500,000 for Clinton's legal defense fund, which Trie returned, the Times said.
White House spokesman Jim Kennedy told the Times on Friday: "As we have said before, the president had no knowledge of, or reason to suspect, problems in campaign fund-raising. Nothing in the many investigations since that time has demonstrated otherwise."
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