For Clintons, An Unwelcome Echo

Johnny Chung, left, with the Clintons in 1994--a memory of a fundraising scandal with unwelcome parallels. (AP).

Talk about DEJà VU. Pressed by questions about a scandal-tarred fundraiser, a candidate named Clinton decides to return hundreds of thousands of dollars. The politician's operation promises to conduct criminal background checks on big fundraisers in the future. And it leaks its decisions at night after a busy day in hopes of burying the news and minimizing the damage.

In 1997, the pol, of course, was Bill Clinton and the tainted money came from folks such as John Huang, Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung and Pauline Kanchanalak. A decade later, it's Hillary Rodham Clinton's turn to writerefund checks to deflect attention from a bundler named Norman Hsu. Few American political families in modern times have proved as adept at raising money -- or as practiced at the art of giving it back if it comes with too much baggage.

The eerie echoes of the last Clinton campaign finance scandal are what make the Hsu case so problematic for the current Democratic presidential frontrunner. If it were just a matter of the facts of this particular case, it might be the sort of bad-news story that comes and goes, forgotten long before anyone shows up at a ballot box to case a vote. After all, Hsu also raised money for other Democrats as well, including Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.). But none of them has the same history to overcome.

The Hsu case illustrates the challenges for Hillary Clinton in defining her past. She has to this point managed to use her time as first lady and her marriage to a former president popular within her party ranks to her advantage while largely scrubbing those eight years in the White House of the more controversial chapters. The disputes that dogged her in the 1990s -- Whitewater, cattle futures, the White House travel office, Vincent Foster -- have been absent from the campaign trail this time, as have memories of the many issues that her husband had to contend with, including campaign finances.

The Hsu case has nothing to do with those episodes in a direct sense, of course. An apparel manufacturer in New York, he grew up in Hong Kong before moving to the United States in 1969 to attend college and eventually raised money for Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 before joining the Clinton team this time. When a 15-year-old arrest warrant from an investment fraud conviction emerged, he failed to appear at a hearing and was later caught in Colorado.

After the Los Angeles Times reported that the FBI was looking into a Hsu business venture in which investors were pressed to contribute to Clinton, the campaign took a page straight from the 1990s playbook -- it decided to return the $850,000 Hsu had raised, then tipped off a couple reporters late on a day dominated by testimony by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the Iraq commander.

The case evokes the fundraising scandals born out of Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996, which dominated Washington for more than a year after the vote as one unseemly tale after another emerged about White House fundraising tactics and the characters trying to buy access through questionable if not illegal methods.

The president used the White House to stroke donors in a more methodical way than any of his predecessors had ever done, inviting hundreds of top contributors and politically connected people to attend coffees with him in the executive mansion or even to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. ("Ready to start overnights right away," Clinton wrote on a fundraising memo.) Vice President Al Gore made fundraising calls from his office and attended a fundraiser at a Buddhist temple where nuns who had taken vows of poverty were illegally reimbursed for $2,500 contributions.

The Clinton team ended up sending back millions of dollars as the revelations widened. John Huang, a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, raised $3.4 million for the party and its campaign, but nearly half of it had to be returned because of questions about the donors, including some from overseas. Huang was the one who organized the Gore event at the Hsi Lai Temple outside Los Angeles that brought in $140,000, most of which had to be given back.

The DNC also returned $253,000 donated by businesswoman Pauline Kanchanalak after she said the money came from her mother-in-law and $366,000 to Johnny Chung, who told investigators a Chinese military officer had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars to funnel to the Democrats. The Clinton legal defense fund refunded or refused to accept at least $640,000 from Charlie Trie, a businessman who showed up one day with two manila envelopes filled with checks.

Hillary Clinton was caught up in the scandals to some degree. At one point, it emerged that Chung had delivered $50,000 directly to the first lady's chief of staff, Maggie Williams, at the White House. Williams forwarded the check to the DNC, even though federal law bars officials from receiving political donations on government property.

Much of the money was aimed at buying access. Roger Tamraz, a Lebanese-American oil financier, openly admitted that he gave $300,000 to advance his plans to build a $2.5 billion oil pipeline and said he gladly would have given twice as much. Chung, who parlayed his generosity into 49 visits to the White House to further his interests with foreign business clients even though the National Security Council had warned that he was a "hustler," provided perhaps the most memorable line of the scandal, explaining his actions by saying: "The White House is like a subway. You have to put in coins to open the gates."

As it happens, Hillary Clinton is not the only candidate running for president now who had a role in the 1990s drama that might hurt today. Former senator Fred Thompson (Tenn.), who just jumped into the Republican race, was the chairman of the Senate committee that investigated the fundraising abuses, but came under withering criticism from fellow Republicans for being too evenhanded and not aggressive enough in attacking Democrats