Monica commuted to the defense department and made a life for herself at the Watergate. She worked out in the Watergate Hotel gym and shopped for groceries at the Watergate Safeway. She brought a photograph into the Watergate Gallery to be framed—a picture of her and the president, smiling at an official function, not unlike scores of similar photographs the gallery framed over the years for other Watergate residents. “I remember she was very concerned about leaving it here,” recalled Dale Johnson, the gallery owner. “It was priceless to her.” Monica was a regular at the Watergate Salon, recommending it to her friend Linda Tripp, who sometimes stayed overnight in the spare bedroom at Watergate South.
In September 1997, Monica’s world began to unwind. Her mother moved to New York, to be closer to her new boyfriend, Peter Straus, whom she had met at the launch of her book The Private Lives of the Three Tenors. Monica remained behind at the Watergate. White House aide Marsha Scott gave Lewinsky some bad news: the White House position she was seeking had been eliminated. And, unknown to Monica, her coworker at the Pentagon, Linda Tripp, began secretly recording their conversations about Monica’s affair with the president.
In October, an anonymous woman called The Rutherford Institute, which was funding the Paula Jones civil lawsuit against Bill Clinton, and told them about the Lewinsky-Clinton affair. Linda Tripp met with Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff and disclosed her tapes of conversations with Lewinsky. At the request of Clinton’s personal secretary Betty Currie, White House deputy chief of staff John Podesta contacted U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson and asked him to interview Lewinsky for a job in New York. Richardson’s office scheduled a meeting in a Watergate Hotel suite for October 31, 1997. “Over my dead body will you go to that hotel room,” Tripp said. “They are trying to set you up.” Tripp suggested Lewinsky ask to be interviewed in the hotel’s dining room in order to avoid a “compromising situation.” In fact, Michael Isikoff had arranged for another Newsweek reporter to be in the dining room, so he could observe Lewinsky and Richardson together.
On December 15, attorneys for Paula Jones served Clinton with a request to produce “documents related to communications between the President and Monica Lewinsky.” On December 19, Jones’s lawyers served Lewinsky with a subpoena. Lewinsky called Betty Currie and told her she was “concerned” about possibly being asked to turn over gifts the president had given her. Currie drove to the Watergate and picked up “a box of stuff” from Lewinsky’s apartment. Currie took the box home and put it under her bed. She planned to store the box, she testified later, until Lewinsky “wanted it back.”
On January 12, 1998, Linda Tripp delivered her tapes to independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Three days later, Starr asked the justice department for authority to investigate the Lewinsky matter, and a three-judge panel approved the request on January 16. That day, at the request of Starr’s deputies, Linda Tripp lured Monica Lewinsky to the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton. Federal authorities intercepted Lewinsky, and Michael Emmick, a member of Starr’s team of prosecutors, told her she could be indicted for perjury, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors offered her immunity, but only if she accepted before midnight. Monica called her mother in New York, reaching Lewis at her Manhattan apartment, while her sister and mother were in town visiting. Monica explained the situation. “Where are you? Where are you?” her mother shouted into the phone. Marcia Lewis knew this day would come. She and Debra had both been aware of Monica’s affair with the president, almost from the start. The three women raced to Penn Station to catch the next train to Washington. Debra and Bronia went directly to the Watergate; Marcia went to the Ritz-Carlton to join Monica.
Later that night, back in Watergate South, Marcia and Monica became convinced their duplex was bugged. They spoke only in whispers—in the bathroom, with the water running. “This was not how we should be living in America in this century,” Monica told her biographer Andrew Morton. “It reminded me of The Diary of Anne Frank.” They moved temporarily into the apartment of Monica’s grandmother on the sixth floor.
Just before midnight on January 17, 1998, the “Drudge Report” posted a “world exclusive”: “At the last minute, at 6 P.M. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern had carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!” The next day, “Drudge” identified the White House intern as Monica Lewinsky.
On Monday, January 19, 1998—Martin Luther King Day—Starr’s investigators arrived with a subpoena to search Apartment 114 in Watergate South.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, YAH LIN “CHARLIE” TRIE SIGNED A one-year lease on Apartment 121 Watergate South, just down the hall from Elizabeth and Bob Dole. Although the $3,500 a month rent on the three-bedroom townhouse was more than he could afford, according to congressional investigators, “appearance was important to Trie” and he believed “a Watergate address gave him a certain stature as a businessman.” He presented to the leasing agent a letter of reference signed by an official at the Democratic National Committee.
Charlie Trie grew up in a poor military family that had escaped the 1949 Communist revolution and settled in Taiwan. He immigrated to the United States in 1974, arriving in Little Rock, Arkansas, where his older sister operated several Chinese restaurants. In 1984, Charlie took over one of the restaurants, called Fu Lin, which under his management became popular with local politicians, including Bill Clinton, the young governor of Arkansas. The two men became friends: Trie called Clinton Lao Ke—Chinese for “old Clinton”—and the governor helped Trie when he ran into trouble with the local health department.
Trie told Clinton he was tired of the restaurant business and wanted to try something new, perhaps open some sort of trading firm focused on China. Clinton encouraged the idea, telling his friend that China was “evolving politically” and would soon be expanding its global trading relationships. Trie took the governor’s advice, sold the restaurant and in October 1992 started Daihatsu International Trading Corporation—sharing a name, but nothing else, with Daihatsu Motor Company of Japan, exporters of a “large compact” automobile, the Daihatsu Charade. Trie’s venture got off to a rocky start. He lost most of the profits from the sale of his restaurant when he tried, without success, to market a Chinese-made wrench to Walmart and other U.S. chain stores. After another failed attempt in early 1994 to buy and refurbish the Camelot Hotel in downtown Little Rock, Trie decided to follow his friend, the former governor of Arkansas and now the president of the United States, to Washington.
Trie used his Watergate apartment to host delegations of visiting Chinese and Taiwanese businessmen for receptions and parties. Ng Lap Seng, chairman of a commercial and residential real estate firm based in Macau, and Antonio Pan, a Taiwanese-born businessman, worked out of Trie’s Watergate apartment whenever they were in town.
Between May and June 1994, Trie and his wife donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee, which qualified him as a member of the DNC’s finance board of directors. Trie was seated at the head table of a fund-raising dinner for Asian donors to the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign on May 13, 1995. During his welcoming remarks, President Clinton turned to Charlie and said, “It’s been 20 years since I had my first meal with Charlie Trie. At the time, neither of us could afford a ticket to this dinner.”
Trie sought a White House appointment to the newly created Presidential Commission on U.S. Trade and Investment Policy, but was told the fifteen-member commission was already full. He kept pushing. He lined up endorsements from the Democratic National Committee and Ernest Green, a Lehman Brothers banker, longtime fund-raiser for the Democratic Party and another friend of Clinton from Arkansas. Despite concerns within the administration that Trie, who just four years earlier was running a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, lacked the stature to join a panel whose members included the CEO of American Express, the former chairman of the Export-Import Bank and the CEO of the Recording
Industry Association of America, White House aides made it clear to staff at the office of the U.S. Trade Representative that Trie was “a must person.” In January 1996, President Clinton signed an executive order adding a few more slots to the commission, one of which was set aside for his friend Charlie Trie.
On March 20, 1996, Charlie Trie called Michael Cardozo, a banker and the executive director of the Presidential Legal Expense Trust, which was established in June 1984 to fund the personal legal bills of the Clintons arising from the Whitewater and other investigations and various lawsuits. Cardozo, who had never heard of Trie, suggested they talk over the phone, but Trie insisted on meeting in person. The next day, in Cardozo’s conference room, Trie opened the conversation by explaining his history with President Clinton, tracing their friendship back to Little Rock. Trie then asked if Cardozo’s merchant banking firm could assist in finding a U.S. distributor for a Chinese-made novelty item—a small package that, when punched with a fist, as Trie demonstrated personally, inflated to become the shape of an immediately recognizable product, like a bottle or can of Coca-Cola. Perplexed by the demonstration, Cardozo said he could not be of assistance. Trie then said he was aware of the Clintons’ mounting legal bills and wanted to help. He emptied a manila envelope onto the conference table. According to Cardozo, “out came a mound of checks and money orders” totaling $460,000. As he looked at the pile on his table, Cardozo flashed back to Watergate and Maurice Stans, the ill-fated finance chairman of the Nixon reelection campaign. “When people drop large sums of money off in manila envelopes in Washington, DC,” Cardozo said later, “you’ve got to be really careful about how you handle those funds.”
Trie excused himself to attend a lunch next door at the Palm Restaurant. Cardozo and his assistant, Sally Schwartz, studied the checks and money orders closely and immediately flagged about $70,000 as problematic—missing names or addresses, or made out to an amount above the $1,000 limits in the trust’s guidelines. The trust had received other “bundled” contributions, but the $460,000 sitting on their table was as much as half the total contributions received to date, and the average contribution was nearly five times higher than a typical contribution. When Trie returned from lunch, Cardozo returned $70,000 in “problematic” contributions to Trie, who assured him he could “cure” any problems. With respect to the remaining contributions, Trie said he was about to be appointed to a federal commission and could not have his name connected to them.
Over the next two weeks, Schwartz inspected Trie’s checks and money orders closely. She discovered some of the money orders were sequentially numbered, which meant they were purchased at the same location, but were filled out by people scattered around the country. A number of checks from different accounts had the same misspelling of the word “presidential”—spelled instead as “presidencial.” The trust retained Investigative Group, Inc., known as IGI, a private investigative firm, to dig further. IGI determined that Trie likely laundered some or all of the funds through members of the Suma Ching Hai Buddhist sect based in Taiwan, a controversial organization described by some as a cult. Beginning in June 1996, the trust began mailing contributions back to the donors, enclosing a cover letter instructing them they could resubmit their contributions if they met the trust’s guidelines. Because the donations were received and returned during the first half of 1996, they were not included in the next report from the trust, released on August 14, 1996, which listed only “contributions accepted.” At a press conference on the trust’s mid-year financial disclosure, Cardozo was specifically asked by a reporter whether any contributions were returned because they came from someone who was “unsavory or anything like that.”
“No,” Cardozo responded.
Bill Clinton was reelected to a second term on November 5, 1996. Three days later, he signed a copy of his campaign book, Between Hope and History: Meeting America’s Challenges for the 21st Century, “To Charlie Trie with thanks.” A Clinton aide mailed the signed book to Trie at his Watergate South apartment.
On December 2, 1996, NBC investigative reporter John Mattes called Michael Cardozo and said he was working on a story about a large number of contributions by Asian-Americans to the trust that had been returned. Cardozo met twice with Clinton White House aides to review the history of the Trie-related contributions, none of which had yet been disclosed to the public. White House aides decided to release details about the contributions at a press conference, and Cardozo called Mark Fabiani, a former White House counsel who had handled press inquiries related to the Whitewater controversy, to manage the logistics. On December 16, Cardozo announced the trust was returning approximately $600,000 in donations Trie had delivered to their offices, after an internal investigation had raised “significant concerns” about the true sources of the money. “Just a few years ago, Trie, a Taiwan-born U.S. citizen, was serving up Chinese food in a shabby section of downtown Little Rock, Ark.,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Today he is known as an international deal-maker and Democratic high roller who maintains an address at the luxury Watergate apartments in Washington and has access to the White House.”
White House spokesman Lanny Davis told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer the Presidential Legal Expense Trust had “done the right thing” by returning $600,000 in contributions at a time when the Clintons still faced over $2 million in legal fees. “As soon as anyone in the White House learned that Mr. Trie had some fundraising problems, which wasn’t until October when it got some publicity,” Davis added, “immediately there was a heads up to the DNC to check this individual out regarding contributions and fundraising practices.”
“This is a very positive story from our standpoint,” Davis added.
Trie fled the country in January 1997, three months after investigators searched his Watergate South apartment. He did not return to the United States until 1998, when he pleaded guilty to one felony count of causing the Democratic National Committee to make a false report to the Federal Elections Commission and to a misdemeanor charge of making $5,000 in contributions in the names of others. He was fined $5,000, sentenced to four months’ home detention—in Little Rock—and three years’ probation, and ordered to perform two hundred hours of community service. The DNC and the Presidential Legal Expense Trust returned a total of $1.3 million in contributions raised by Charlie Trie.
In March 1998, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee concluded its investigation into the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign fund-raising controversies. The investigation, which lasted a year and included thirty-two “often vituperative and partisan public hearings,” cost taxpayers $3.5 million. Democrats on the committee refused to endorse the Republican majority’s findings and issued their own conclusions. “I thought I could pull everybody together,” lamented committee chairman Fred D. Thompson, the Tennessee Republican. “But I couldn’t do it.”
Republicans concluded the Chinese government “fashioned a plan before the 1996 elections . . . to influence our political process, ostensibly through stepped-up lobbying efforts and also funding from Beijing. Over time, the plan evolved and the PRC engaged in much more than simply ‘lobbying.’” According to the Democrats on the committee, however, the investigation turned up “no evidence that funds from a foreign government influenced the outcome of any 1996 election, altered U.S. domestic or foreign policy, or damaged our national security.”
Charlie Trie, Republicans concluded, had “raised and laundered contributions for the benefit of the President and First Lady. . . . The evidence also reveals that senior members of the White House staff were informed of this disturbing fact. . . . Rather than publicly disclosing Trie’s involvement with the Trust, however, the White House sought to keep the matter secret until after the presidential election.”
The Democrats disagreed, saying any delay in disclosing the return of the checks Trie delivered to Michael Cardozo was driven by legitimate concerns “about protecting the privacy” of other donors who were making perfectly legal contributions. Fur
thermore, the Democratic National Committee had “no reason” to suspect Trie of any wrongdoing at the time, in part because he had “prospered in the restaurant business in Arkansas” and also because he “maintained offices at an expensive location”—his apartment at the Watergate.
According to the Washington Post, Republicans failed to uncover evidence that put any Democratic operative or donor in jail. Democrats in turn failed to construct a credible defense of the Clinton campaign fund-raising machine, and were able to move the controversy to the back burner “only when it was replaced by the fresher, and far easier to understand, controversy involving former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.”
Conservative columnists, including Michelle Malkin and Morton Kondracke, gave the Clinton-Gore 1996 campaign scandal a name: Chinagate.
AFTER LEAVING HIS PARENTS’ WATERGATE WEST APARTMENT, David Bradley bought the Lee House on Capitol Hill as the new home of Research Counsel of Washington. It was a four-story walk-up with no central air-conditioning. Each night during the summer, the windows were left open to cool down the building. In the morning, there was a thin layer of ash on the windowsills and sometimes on the desks. Their next-door neighbor was Lee Crematorium. When the new summer interns figured out the real source of the ash, David recalled, “we suffered H.R. problems.”
In the summer of 1983, Princeton undergraduate Katherine Brittain started an internship at the Research Counsel. She was tall and blond, with blue eyes and a beautiful smile. David, thirty, was smitten. He wanted to know more about her. He owned a research company, after all. His findings were not promising: She was already in a serious relationship.
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