posted July 17, 2005 07:56 PM            

Betty Lambuth's story epitomizes the rank corruption of the Clinton administration. An employee of Northrop Grumman, she was part of the task force contracted by the White House to search out records in response to numerous subpoenas from various agencies investigating the many Clinton scandals. According to her affidavit, submitted by Judicial Watch's Larry Klayman to U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth last week, she discovered that numerous e-mails were not being properly recorded by the White House computer system. When she brought this matter to the attention of White House personnel, White House Office of Administration Director Mark Lindsay threatened her.

Quoted by ABCNews.com, she reported that "Lindsay said that if I or any of my team who knew about the e-mail problem told anyone else about it we would loose (sic) our jobs, be arrested and put in jail."

Further, the files stored on individual computers were often unchecked. Sheryl Hall, a former White House computer specialist, offered a similar statement in her affidavit, including information which suggested the White House had plans to delete many of the stored files on individual computer systems.

Judge Lamberth is not taking this matter lightly. He not only called for the names of those responsible for maintaining the records, but also suggested he would "hang" anyone who deleted or misplaced files. He further refused to force Larry Klayman to submit to White House counsel a complete list of whistleblowers against the Administration.
It's about time.

White House personnel are trying to dismiss these latest revelations as "old news," or yet another "snafu." Using the highest powers of government to threaten and intimidate people is not a "snafu," it's criminal. They offered the same blasé answer to questions about Maria Hsia's felony convictions on illegal campaign fundraising -- as if the words "no controlling legal authority" had never been uttered. Further, portions of the LaBella memorandum to Attorney General Janet Reno have found their ways into the mainstream media, and they reveal a pattern of obfuscation and ignorance that is, quite simply, dangerous. LaBella implied, in the harshest of terms, that Janet Reno was ignoring evidence that directly implicated the White House, including First Lady Hillary Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, in the illegal fundraising schemes.

How many snafus has this administration allowed to happen under their watch? Some of the most alarming have been reviewed in this column over the last year, but bear repeating:

Some 900 FBI files miraculously appeared at the White House, the majority of which were on top ranking Republicans.

The firing of Billy Dale and other White House travel office employees. Billy Dale was exonerated of all the charges against him in less than four (4) hours; however, he was financially ruined and his reputation was destroyed in the process.

President Clinton signed a waiver that allowed Johnny Huang a position at the Commerce Department without benefit of a FBI background check, giving him access to Top Secret materials. He was granted clearance several months before he began officially working at the White House, and retained it even after he officially left his position at Commerce.

Ira Sockowitz was allowed to leave the Commerce Department with top secret files in his possession and retained his clearance after he left the White House.

President Clinton signed a waiver allowing Poly Technologies, a Chinese front company, to import 100,000 weapons in violation of Clinton's own gun ban.

The White House's interference in the Long Beach Naval base transfer. The White House pushed for the Chinese Ocean Shipping Company(COSCO) to purchase the base, despite the fact that COSCO ships were caught smuggling drugs and illegal aliens, were caught paying bribes to avoid paying tariffs, and were caught in a sting operation (known as Dragon Fire) for attempting to sell 2,000 fully automatic AK-47s to California street gangs.

Via Executive Order, President Clinton overrode Comsat's decision not to transfer all satellites to the Commerce Department, and also allowed Commerce control of hot engine technologies.

The Clinton administration ignored China's direct violation of every non-proliferation treaty it had ever signed. Despite repeated violations, sanctions were imposed only twice against individual companies, never against China as a country.

The Clinton administration accepted millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions from suspected Chinese spies and drug runners. Some of the contributions were solicited and accepted directly in the White House itself.

The Clinton administration repeatedly lied about suspected espionage at the nuclear labs. A report detailing the suspected espionage of Peter Lee was provided to the White House in 1998. As late as March of 1999, the White House insisted it had no knowledge of spying, even though Peter Lee was convicted in March of 1998 for divulging classified nuclear submarine tracking secrets to the Chicoms in 1997.

Despite the release of the bipartisan Cox Report in March 1999 -- which detailed the dangerous and haphazard way in which dual-use technology transfers were being made to Communist China -- President Clinton signed a waiver in May 1999 allowing China to purchase fuel and separation technology for Iridium satellites.

The Clinton administration started a national smear campaign against Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky, by alleging that she was a deranged "stalker" who would claim a relationship with this President, even though "he couldn't do that."

In January of 1998, in response to discovery documents by Paula Jones's attorneys, the Clinton administration denied any knowledge of letters or correspondence pertinent to Kathleen Willey, only to release said documents to the press after Willey's televised interview in March 1998.

posted July 17, 2005 08:10 PM            

China Wants War
Charles R. Smith
Monday, July 18, 2005
PLA General Calls For Nuclear attacks on U.S.

Reporters from the Financial Times and Asian Wall Street journal were surprised to see Chinese army general Zhu Chenghu, the dean of the Chinese National Defense University, speaking at a recent event sponsored by the Better Hong Kong Foundation.

"If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," stated Zhu to the shocked audience.
"If the Americans are determined to interfere, [then] we will be determined to respond," said Zhu in reference to Taiwan.

"We ... will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds ... of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese."

The Chinese official government spokesman refused to retract the statements made by General Zhu.

"We will never tolerate 'Taiwan Independence', neither will we allow anybody with any means to separate Taiwan from the motherland," said a foreign ministry spokesman.

So, Beijing has determined that it will reunite with its long-lost brothers and sisters in Taiwan even if it has to kill every last one of them - along with a hundred million U.S. citizens.

The last U.S. flag officer who suggested that nuclear weapons might be used on China was forced into an early retirement. Nuclear war policy is made in the White House and decisions to fight an atomic war rest with the president. Statements such as those made by Zhu are reserved for only the highest office in the United States.

General Xiong

However, it is clear that things are radically different in China. This is not the first time that a Chinese general has threatened to wage atomic war against America.

In 1996, a flag officer of the PLA stated that he was willing to vaporize Los Angeles if the U.S. came to the defense of Taiwan. PLA General Xiong was promoted after he made that statement. Xiong won second in command of the Chinese army and head of PLA military intelligence by threatening to turn L.A. into fallout ash.

The most recent threat to use nuclear weapons, by General Zhu, applies not just to the literal definition of Chinese territory but also to her warships and aircraft. Thus, even a defensive move by the U.S. against Chinese warships or aircraft may trigger World War III.

Meanwhile, inside Beijing the Chinese air force fighter pilot who rammed a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft over international waters is considered a hero because he was defending the "motherland" against the evil Western powers.

Right after the ramming incident, the Chinese foreign ministry declared that all of the South China Sea was PRC territory, in violation of the U.N. treaties that Beijing signed on to.

In addition, in 2004 the Chinese navy sent a nuclear-powered attack submarine inside Japanese territorial waters. The sub did not stray into Japanese territorial waters – it was ordered to violate international law at the highest levels. That little act of war was a deliberate and provocative demonstration of the mindset inside Beijing.

Not a Threat

Yet we still have Americans who feel that China is not a threat. I find it hard to understand anyone who would dare to claim that an open call for nuclear war is not a threat to the United States.

Many lawyers, corporate citizens and bankers favor the PRC and its nightmare takeover bid. They see no threat in the attempted takeover of Unocal by a Chinese government-owned company. Not only is the bid by the Chinese oil company illegal, because most of the money is to be provided by the PRC government, it is also dangerous to U.S. security, both political and economic.

I am sure that there are those who would claim that a Chinese government buyout of Lockheed or Boeing would also be a simple financial transaction. They do not see the direct threat in the Unocal oil company being held by a government willing to violate all international laws and treaties it has signed.

They clearly do not see the organized effort to de-industrialize the U.S. They do not see the unemployed Americans, forced to fight for their lives, competing with the virtual slave labor force employed by the PLA. The lawyers, bankers and corporate big wigs do not see the Lao Gai concentration camps in China, where millions of political prisoners shovel coal and manufacture goods for sale in the U.S.

There is no discussion of national security, human rights or labor rights at the corporate board level. The only topic of discussion is return on investment to the stockholders.

There are many who do not understand or want to hear the words of Chinese General Zhu. I, for one, believe Zhu. The Chinese army and the Chinese Communist Party want to fight a nuclear war with the U.S.

If China wants to re-establish its 3,000-year-old empire and return all lands lost to the "motherland," then everything east of Warsaw needs to be turned over at once.

If China would like to stop living in the past and join the civilized world, statements such as those made by Zhu have to be punished, not rewarded.

General Zhu's words are a wake-up call. It is time to stop dealing with the communists in China. Stop the trade; stop the sending of advanced technology, close the PLA companies operating here in the U.S.

posted July 17, 2005 08:16 PM            

"The more you look into this business of the transfer of advanced, sophisticated technology to the Chinese military, which seems to be clearly for campaign contributions, the harder it is to stay away from words like treason," says House Majority Leader Dick Armey.

The obvious question that statement raises, of course, is, "Then why shy away from such words?"

I've been using that word for some time. It's a powerful word, a compelling word and an accurate word to describe what Bill Clinton has committed, not once, but several times as president.

We all know about the Loral Corp.'s transfer of technology that permitted the criminal regime in Beijing to better target U.S. cities with nuclear weapons. I believe the Rosenbergs were executed for a crime similar in nature, but one which actually left our civilian population far less vulnerable.

One little fact still overlooked, in fact, to my knowledge, still unreported by any other news agency in the world besides this one, is that Loral was at the time of the transfer and remains today in a formal business partnership with the Chinese military. In other words, President Clinton approved, over the objections of his Justice Department and State Department, Loral's use of Chinese rocket technology to boost sensitive satellites into orbit when its chairman, Bernard Schwartz, the biggest individual contributor to his 1996 re-election campaign, was working hand-in-glove with, arguably, the most oppressive regime on the planet. Schwartz was Clinton's first choice, by the way, to be secretary of Defense.

Another overlooked angle on who owns Clinton dates back much further. Do you know who was the largest contributor to Clinton's first presidential race in 1992? Can you guess who provided more campaign cash than the National Education Association, all other labor unions, any political action committees and all other individuals and families? Mochtar and James Riady. And do you know who the Riadys are? Besides being Indonesian billionaires, they are strongly suspected by Clinton's own FBI of being intelligence agents for Beijing. Their history with Clinton goes all the way back to his earliest political days in Little Rock when he first sought to become Arkansas' attorney general. Why were these billionaires, so cozy with the Chinese Communists, interested in this relatively obscure politician as far back as the 1970s?

Clinton's long and profitable relationship with the Riadys raises the question of his motives behind the federalization of Utah's Grande Staircase of the Escalante, the largest coal and mineral reserve in the U.S. The area was about to begin mining the highest quality coal available in the world, with a value estimated to be $1 trillion. The only other coal that could compete in terms of quality comes from a mine in Indonesia owned by, you guessed it, the Riadys.

Then there's the little matter of the former U.S. Naval Base at Long Beach, Calif. A plan is still under consideration to turn the base over to the Chinese Overseas Shipping Co., or COSCO, a virtual subsidiary of the Chinese military and a den of Communist spies. Who was the architect of this incredible plan? The president of the United States -- Bill Clinton. The president held two meetings, one in the White House with his chief of staff and deputy secretary of defense, to lobby for the deal. The White House proposed the concept to local officials in Long Beach.

You want more? Clinton denounces U.S. politicians who accept American tobacco money and gratefully takes it himself from a Chinese government-owned tobacco monopoly. Clinton hates automatic weapons, but weeks after a Chinese gun-running company, Poly Technologies, is caught attempting to smuggle 2,000 AK-47s into the U.S to arm L.A. street gangs, the president has coffee with the head of the firm in the White House. Clinton hates U.S.-made semi-automatics, too, but when Wang Jun, president of that same Poly Technologies, escorted by Charlie Trie, visits the White House, the president approves a shipment of more than 100,000 such weapons into the United States. Clinton's own staff warns him off John Huang, an operative of the Riadys' Lippo Group, yet the president personally intervenes to get him a top-security clearance at the Commerce Department. I could go on and on. But you get the picture.

There is only one logical conclusion to draw from this pattern. The president of the United States is, at best, severely compromised by the Chinese and, at worst, bought and paid for by them. Either way, it spells the same thing -- treason with a capital T.

posted July 17, 2005 08:21 PM            

WASHINGTON -- The latest Chinagate eruption differs from all previous Clinton controversies because it doesn't require people to hear a lot of grisly stuff about the president's lust or his wife's greed. This one focuses on the simple issue of incompetence.
In less than six years as commander in chief, Bill Clinton has done what Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and the rest of the Cold War tyrants couldn't accomplish. He has drained the American military of its muscle, crippled its will, sucked the brains from the intelligence establishment and removed what backbone remained in the foreign-policy establishment.

Nobody fears us anymore. Nobody respects us. The word has gotten out: If you want the United States to treat you well, behave badly.

When North Korea began threatening South Korea with nuclear annihilation, we gave them a bunch of nuclear reactors and ordered them to start behaving -- within 10 years. When China provoked a confrontation with Taiwan, the president relaxed export restrictions -- clearing the way for the communist regime in Beijing to develop an incredible arsenal.

When the Serbs commit atrocities, we hold press conferences. When the Russians sell sensitive technology to Iran, we threaten to put less ice in Boris Yeltsin's drinks. We punished India for detonating bombs by selling it a strategically useful supercomputer -- and then threatening economic sanctions.

This week, the administration relaxed sanctions against Iran -- which the State Department again has dubbed the world's foremost exporter of terrorism. We did the same for Libya, No. 2 on the terror list. And, of course, we tried to talk Pakistan back from the nuclear brink by offering to fulfill an old order for $600 million worth of fighter jets.

Is it any wonder heads of state laugh when we lecture them on the evils of nuclear proliferation? The question is whether our bungling is the result of accident or design. To find an answer, let us examine the case of China.

Soon after taking office, Bill Clinton authorized a dramatic change in the rules governing the sale of supercomputers. He gave the Department of Commerce permission to sell units that were more than 20 times as fast as anything we ever had permitted beyond our borders.

We sold them to such nations as India and China. Although the machines ostensibly were sent to help other nations create nuclear power plants, we didn't monitor their uses. Now, intelligence reports indicate that the computers play crucial roles in both countries' weapons-development efforts.

The administration also let loose highly sensitive encryption technology that gives China the capability of decoding some of our own spy satellite transmissions. The president personally authorized that transfer over the objections of the State and Defense departments, and the intelligence establishment.

The administration permitted two companies with close Democratic ties, Hughes Aircraft and Loral Space & Communications Ltd., to help China launch American satellites that contained encryption microchips. When one such launch went awry, American teams went to search the wreckage. They found a Loral satellite more or less intact -- except for the encryption microchips, which were missing!

Subsequently, China got U.S. help in fixing up its rockets to avoid future explosions. The mishap thus produced two perverse results: China now not only has the microchips, it also can hit the United States with nuclear weapons. All but five of the communist nation's 18 ICBMs are aimed at us. To top it off, those rockets within a decade will have the ability to launch 10 warheads apiece, rather than just one -- also thanks to American know-how.

China got access to all this stuff because the Clinton administration invited it to. The White House wiped away many previous controls on the export of sensitive equipment or technology. It transferred responsibility for evaluating the sales from the Departments of Defense and State, which tend to view such things through the prism of national security, to the Department of Commerce, which looks for a quick buck.

As all this was going on, an interesting cadre of characters were making Camp Clinton safe for espionage. The president placed John Hujng in the Department of Commerce, ostensibly in a mid-level job. But Huang moved in only the highest circles.

He pressured the administration to put Bernard Schwartz on a 1994 trade mission to China. Schwartz is the head of Loral (the satellite maker) and the most generous contributor this decade to the Democratic Party. Schwartz got on the trip and later secured a billion-dollar contract with China. His company may have breached national security when it sent satellites to China, but the president signed an executive order that made Loral's behavior legal -- an ex post facto pardon.

While Huang worked at the Commerce Department, he received 37 classified briefings from the CIA on -- you guessed it -- satellite encryption technology. He regularly sent packages to China, showed up at the Chinese embassy and maintained a private office outside the Commerce Department, from which he made hundreds of calls to Asia.

Scandal devotees will recall that Huang received a top-secret security clearance without a background check. The unusual clearance became effective six months before he officially went to work for the government and remained effective a year after he left Uncle Sam's employ.

He managed also to get involved with Johnny Chung -- who has told federal investigators that he received $300,000 from the daughter of China's top military man and that he routed at least one-third of that sum to the Democratic Party -- and Charlie Trie, who escorted several top Chinese officials (including at least two top arms merchants) into the White House.

This kind of security breach tops anything we know about in modern times. And what did we get in return?

We got a made-in-the-USA nuclear arms race in what rapidly is becoming the most unstable area of the world -- the Asia-Pacific region. India and Pakistan have nukes -- or the capability to manufacture them. Indonesia is in the midst both of a melt-down and an arms build-up. Malaysia has been increasing its defense spending at a clip of nearly 10 percent per year. North Korea continues to create problems. And China helps arm virtually every one of them.

You don't have to get into the vagaries of Democratic Party fundraising to understand that the administration's casual attitude toward national security has placed us all in some jeopardy. If the White House were as jealous of our technological secrets as it is of the president's personal ventures, we could breathe easy. Unfortunately, we can't -- and our new insecurity is the result not of dumb luck, but of dumb and deliberate policy.

posted July 17, 2005 08:38 PM            

WITH THE PUBLICATION OF THE COX REPORT, we now know that seven years of the Clinton Administration have coincided with the most massive breach of military security in American history. That as a result of the calculated degrading of security controls at America’s nuclear laboratories, the Chinese Communists have been able to steal the designs of our arsenal of nuclear weapons, including our most advanced warheads. That as a result of the 1993 Clinton decision to terminate the COCOM security controls that denied sensitive technologies to nuclear proliferators and potential adversary powers, the Chinese Communists have been given the secrets of our intercontinental ballistic missile systems, along with previously restricted computer hardware. This allows them for the first time to target cities in the United States. In a little over five years, the Chinese Communist dictatorship has been able to close a technology gap of twenty years and to destroy a security buffer that had kept America safe from foreign attacks on its territorial mainland for more than a hundred.

Throughout its entire history until 1957, the United States was protected from such attacks by two oceans that have provided a natural barrier insulating it from potential aggressors. In 1957 the Soviet Union acquired an intercontinental missile technology that erased this advantage. Since then, the only real protection the United States has enjoyed has been its technological edge in developing more sophisticated warheads and more accurate missiles than its potential opponents. The edge offered the possibility that America might prevail in a nuclear war, and discouraged pre-emptive strikes. The catastrophe that has occurred on the Clinton watch is summed up in the fact that this edge has now vanished, probably never to be regained.

America’s new vulnerability to nuclear attack is a reality now not merely in respect to China, but vis-à-vis every rogue state that China has chosen to arm. Along with Russia, China is the chief proliferator of nuclear, missile, and satellite technologies to other governments. The governments it has chosen to benefact in this way are notorious stockpilers of biological and chemical weapons. Among them are the most dangerous and dedicated enemies of the United States: Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

Yet, even after the release of the Cox Report, the attitude of the Clinton Administration is still one of hear-no-evil, see-no-evil. The official line, ritually repeated by the Democratic leadership is "everybody does it" and "it’s no big deal," presumably because, at the moment, China only has a few nuclear weapons actually deployed. Far from acknowledging the catastrophe that has occurred or recognizing the dangers it creates, the Clinton White House has hurried to resume export sales of the same previously restricted technologies and to reassert the "strategic partnership" it promoted with the very dictatorship that has declared America its "number one adversary" and has stripped us of our military shield.

Indeed, the government’s awareness of many of the losses dates back several years, during which the Clinton reaction was exactly the same: continue on the destructive course. According to Congressman Curt Weldon, who is a member of the Cox Committee, at least fifteen government officials have experienced the wrath of the Clinton Administration because they tried to protect America’s secrets from being transferred to China. One case was described in a recent Wall Street Journal article by a former security official, Michael Ledeen. According to documents obtained by Ledeen, a mid-level government arms-control bureaucrat was asked in 1997 to provide a memo supporting the Administration’s certification that China was not a nuclear proliferator and could be provided with advanced technologies. This request was made on the eve of a visit from China’s Communist dictator Jiang Zemin. The bureaucrat refused and wrote that the agreement the Clinton Administration was about to sign "presents real and substantial risk to the common defense and security of both the United States and allied countries." The official added that China was actively seeking American secrets and that "China routinely, both overtly and covertly, subverts national and multilateral trade controls on militarily critical items." This patriot was immediately told by his superiors to revise his memo or lose his job. Sadly, he complied with the order and rewrote the document to state that the proposed Clinton trade agreement "is not inimical to the common defense or the security of the United States."

In keeping with its relentless defense of a suicidal policy, the Clinton Administration has failed to prosecute the very spies who have been identified as being responsible for the most critical thefts of American military secrets, and has protected those whose wrists it has slapped. Wen Ho Lee, the man responsible for the most damaging espionage, is known to have downloaded millions of lines of computer code revealing the designs of our most advanced nuclear warheads. But Wen Ho Lee today is a free man. Peter Lee, who gave Communist China our warhead testing techniques and the radar technology to locate our submarines—until then the most secure element of our nuclear deterrent—is also free, having served only a year in a halfway house for his treason.

Wen Ho Lee was actually protected while performing his dirty work. When government agents requested a wiretap on Wen Ho Lee’s phone, the request was denied by Clinton Justice. From its inception, the Clinton Justice Department had never previously denied a wiretap request. In explaining why it has not prosecuted Lee, the Clinton Justice Department claims that its evidence only shows that Lee downloaded the classified information onto a non-secure computer, from which others unknown may have picked it up. But, as defense expert Angelo Codevilla pointed out in a Wall Street Journal article, "by this logic no one could be prosecuted for espionage for putting stolen documents into a dead drop, such as a hollow tree, for later pickup by foreign agents." Of course, the Administration lacks even this transparent excuse in the case of Peter Lee, who did in fact give the information directly to the Communists.

Why is the Clinton Administration feverishly covering up for the Communist Chinese and protecting its leaders and their spies from the wrath that should surely follow their rape of America’s most guarded secrets? Certainly not, as Clinton and his complicit Democrat defenders now claim, because "everyone does it." Unlike China, for example, the state of Israel is a democracy and a proven ally of the United States. Yet when an Israeli agent named Jonathan Pollard was discovered stealing secrets whose dimensions did not even approach the seriousness of these thefts (no technologies, for example, were involved), he was given a life sentence amidst the most solemn anathemas from the officials of the government he betrayed.

The evidence in the case of the Clinton Administration’s cover-up for China’s espionage is compatible with only one conclusion: The reason Bill Clinton is protecting China’s spies and their Communist masters is because in protecting them he is protecting himself. Clinton’s China strategy is fully intelligible only in the frame of Clinton’s strategy on other matters: the President has triangulated with China’s Communist government in pursuit of his own political interest at the expense of the United States. This is not about loyalties that Bill Clinton might have to Communist ideology or Communist dictators. On this, Bill Clinton’s record is clear: he has no loyalties, except to himself. It is the solipsistic nihilism that we have come to know as the very essence of Bill Clinton that has made this treachery possible, even, inevitable.

Clinton’s triangulation with Communist China has been chillingly charted by two national-security professionals (although they do not employ the term itself), with the help of the Thompson Committee investigations into illegal campaign contributions. In Year of the Rat, Bill Triplett and Ed Timperlake show that the roots of the Clinton betrayal lie in relationships that go back to Arkansas, and the fact that Bill Clinton owes his political life to the Chinese Communists through their agents, business associates, and friends.

Year of the Rat begins with the authors’ observation that the number one funder of the Clinton–Gore 1992 presidential campaign was an Arkansas resident and Chinese banker named James Riady, who has been a friend of Bill Clinton for twenty years. Riady is the scion of a multi-billion dollar financial empire which is a working economic and political partnership with China’s military and intelligence establishment. The Riadys gave $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential campaign and another $600,000 to the Democratic National Committee and Democratic state parties.

But the importance of the Riadys to Clinton’s ascent is far greater than even these contributions suggest, and not merely because the Chinese network, in which the Riadys are only one important factor, extends through thousands of companies and individuals whose contributions no one has as yet attempted to track. Without the Riadys, Clinton would not have won the Democratic nomination in the first place, and would not have been in a position to benefit from their later largesse. In the presidential primaries of 1992, in fact, the Riadys were the absolutely crucial factor that stood between Clinton and defeat. After losing the New Hampshire primary, the candidate faced a crucial test in New York. But he had also run out of money. At this critical juncture, James Riady stepped in to arrange a $3.5 million loan to the Clinton campaign. New York proved to be the last real competition that Clinton faced on his path to victory.

When the Arkansas governor stepped onto the national scene, he and Riady were not new acquaintances. They had met in 1978, when Clinton was Attorney General, and had not yet become governor of the state. They were introduced by Clinton’s chief political backer, Jackson Stephens, the head of Stephens, Inc., one of the largest private investment firms outside of Wall Street. "Thus began, a friendship," in the words of Timperlake and Triplett, "that has lasted twenty years, and has spread a web of intrigue, financial corruption, and foreign influence into American government."

James Riady had begun his American banking career earlier in the Seventies as an intern at Stephens, Inc. Later they became partners in the Worthen Bank of Little Rock, the very same bank that subsequently experienced a mysterious fire which destroyed records being sought by Kenneth Starr and other Whitewater investigators in their inquiries into Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm activities. It was also through the Worthen bank that Riady arranged the $3.5 million credit to Clinton’s failing primary campaign. The Riady relationship extended beyond the Clintons themselves to their friends and to Hillary’s associates at Rose, including its head Joe Giroir, and a White House aide named Mark Middleton, who later invoked the Fifth Amendment when he was called before the Thompson committee. It was the Riadys who provided a $100,000 "job" for the indicted Web Hubbell, at the moment when he had indicated to the Starr prosecutors that he might be ready to talk. After the payment from Riady and others, Hubbell changed his mind and chose jail instead.

Understanding the security disaster that has befallen the United States requires an understanding that the leakage of America’s secrets proceeded along two parallel tracks. One was espionage, the other was a political-economic track through the legal commercial activities of the United States government and in particular through its political oversight of these commercial activities. Past administrations had created and enforced formal controls of sensitive technologies that the Clinton team now systematically dismantled. Political contributors to the Clinton–Gore campaigns played key roles in promoting the dismantling process.

A central figure in the economic track of Chinese activities was the Vice President and Far East Area manager for the Worthen Bank, a Chinese-born American named John Huang, who was a friend of Bill from Little Rock days. Triplett and Timperlake make a strong case that it was through the personal intervention of Hillary Clinton that in 1994 John Huang was made a top official in the Commerce Department, where he had access to all the information an agent would need to strip America of the supercomputer technologies vital to the development of advanced weapons systems. Huang also inexplicably retained his top security clearance in the Commerce Department when he left the government.

The decision to leave the government for a position at the Democratic National Committee was made for Huang at a meeting in the Oval office attended by the President, Huang, James Riady, Riady partner and former Rose Law Firm head Joe Giroir, and presidential aide Bruce Lindsey. This meeting took place three days after the President had decided on a strategy to rescue his failing political fortunes which had reached a nadir following the Democrats’ historic defeat in the congressional elections of 1994 and Newt Gingrich’s ascension to the Speakership of the House. It was the first Republican majority in the House in 48 years. Designed by the President’s new political advisor, Dick Morris, the strategy involved a massive television advertising campaign, directed against Gingrich and the Republican House. The campaign has been directly credited with turning the political tide and ensuring the re-election in 1996 of the Clinton team. The chief fund-raiser for this campaign was John Huang.

It should be evident from these facts (and they could easily be amplified) that the alliance Bill Clinton has made with the Riadys and their China network is the key to his political survival and success. It has had consequences for American politics and security so far-reaching that no brief summary can begin to describe them. In 1996, to pick an illustrative example, the Long Beach City Council granted a lease on the demobilized Long Beach Naval Station to a Chinese company named COSCO, which is little more than the naval arm of the Chinese Communist Army and is a major arms supplier to dictators and terrorists. Its cargoes have included rocket fuel for Pakistan, helping to destabilize the Indian peninsula, and nuclear components for Iran, a volatile factor in the Middle East. In 1996, a COSCO ship was seized in Oakland, California, by U.S. Customs agents, who discovered a cargo of 2,000 assault weapons intended for sale to Los Angeles street gangs.

Why would the Long Beach City Council approve a lease to such a company, particularly if the relevant oversight officials in Washington had alerted them to the nature of the COSCO enterprise? But the relevant oversight officials in Washington did not alert Long Beach to the danger posed by COSCO. On the contrary, they encouraged the deal.

In the 1996 election campaign, Johnny Chung—another middleman for the China network and for COSCO in particular—gave $366,000 to the Democratic Party. It was subsequently returned after the campaign finance scandal surfaced and it was clear that it had come illegally from foreign sources. Among the sources was a Chinese intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying, the daughter of China’s highest-ranking military officer. On the eve of the 1996 elections, a White House official named Dorothy Robyn made a conference call to the Long Beach City Council and applied direct pressure on them to push the deal with COSCO through. Robyn told the Council that the "national interest would best be served if the [COSCO] plan proceeds." The chief competitor for the lease, whose application was denied by the White House pressure, was the U.S. Marine Corps.

Nine months before the COSCO lease was sealed, a crisis had developed in the Taiwan Strait. Elections were being held in Taiwan and the Communist regime, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan, was launching intermediate range ballistic missiles with blank warheads in the direction of the island, an act of blatant intimidation. The Clinton Administration had interposed two aircraft carriers from the Seventh Fleet, ostensibly to remind the Communists that Taiwan was an American ally. At that moment, an old Little Rock friend of Bill Clinton’s appeared in Washington with a $460,000 donation to the Presidential Legal Defense Trust that Clinton had set up to defray his legal expenses in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case. The friend also brought his own broken-English personal message: "Any negative outcomes of the U.S. decision in the China Issue will affect your Administration position especially in the campaign year." The messenger was Charlie Trie, owner of the Fu Lin Restaurant in Little Rock. Trie was also a member of the "Four Seas" Triad, a billion-dollar Asian crime syndicate allied to Chinese military and intelligence agencies. Clinton’s written reply to Trie’s blackmail was addressed "Dear Charlie" and assured him and his Communist bosses in Beijing that the interposition of the aircraft carriers was "not intended as a threat to the Peoples Republic of China," but as "a signal to both Taiwan and the PRC that the United States was concerned about maintaining stability in the . . . region."