The Clinton Campaign and the Democrat Party have used one statement by Donald Trump to make wild assertions about foreign influence into the 2016 presidential election.
Trump said: “Russia, if you are listening I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” That one remark is the basis for massive attacks launched by the Clinton campaign.
Clinton accused Trump of encouraging “espionage against our people,” ignoring the fact that it was too late to obtain those emails through “espionage” because Clinton had already destroyed them. If Russia obtained the emails prior to their destruction by Clinton, it would be much better for the U.S. if Russia released them rather than retain them for a possible blackmail file to have over Clinton.
Clinton went on to say, “I think this is such an unprecedented situation, we’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere with our elections.” Other Clinton surrogates accused Trump of treason.
Clinton could only make that statement if she were sure no one in the media would look very deeply into it. Because there actually have been two far more penetrating foreign operations that influenced U.S. elections – one in 1996 and another possibly in 1992.
Those attempts to influence elections involved agents from communist China who sought to help Bill Clinton get reelected in 1996 by donating millions of dollars illegally to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Clinton’s relationship with the Chinese goes back prior to the 1992 election through James Riady, of the Riady banking family of Indonesia and China. According to congressional investigations that occurred in the late-1990s, the Riady family made illegal donations to Clinton’s 1992 campaign and wielded influence over the U.S. policy toward China. During the 1992 campaign, Clinton was a harsh critic of then-President George H. W. Bush for what he called “coddling the butchers of Beijing.” But video later turned up in a 1999 documentary “Trading with the Enemy: How the Clinton Administration Armed China” that shows surreptitiously recorded video of a Clinton associate in China in October of 1992, with a letter from then-Gov. Clinton. That associate, Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie, is seen telling government officials in China that Bill Clinton “wants to invest in China.”
And invest he did.
From the moment Clinton took office in January 1993, he decontrolled advanced strategic weapons technology to China over the objections of his own Department of Defense Export Control Regime, and his own Director of Central Intelligence. Those practices continued through the 1996 election and represented a drastic change from his bellicose words for China in the 1992 campaign for which he cited their atrocious record on “human rights,” and their proliferation of “dangerous weapons technology” — weapons technology that was far less dangerous than what Clinton provided them.
The Chinese reciprocated by pouring millions of dollars in illegal campaign donations and even contributed to Clinton’s Personal Legal Expense Trust Fund through multiple sources that were identified by congressional and FBI investigations to have come from high level Chinese intelligence agents. House and Senate investigations of what became known as the “China/Democratic National Committee Fundraising Scandal” turned up startling details of how deep the Chinese penetration of the Clinton Administration was. All of this was documented in congressional reports on the subject and by nearly every major news agency as well as in the documentary “Trading with the Enemy.”
The Department of Justice investigation under Attorney General Janet Reno sounds familiar to our present day. Reno steadfastly refused to appoint an independent counsel to investigate despite demands not only from Congress, but from her own FBI Director, Louis J. Freeh, and Charles LaBella, a senior U.S. Attorney whom Reno appointed to oversee the investigation. The Reno Justice Department indicted several figures in the money laundering scandal.
Sadly, those who became the most important witnesses for the government’s case received the harshest penalties, while those who kept quiet and handled the most laundered funds were let off with virtually no punishment at all.
At the time, Republican Congressman Dick Armey suggested that the Clinton weapons technology transfers to China, while he was receiving millions of dollars in contributions from Chinese agents, amounted to “treason.”
Unfortunately, in this election voters will go to the polls with the wrong impression about which candidate has the tightest connection to a foreign government’s influence over an American election.
Scott Wheeler is an author, producer, former investigative journalist and GOP Trust Executive Director. As a journalist, at least two times Wheeler’s reports have been on the desk of the President of the United States, sent by Congress with requests for action. Wheeler’s work has invoked investigations by national federal agencies, as well as by foreign governments. In 2008, motivated by an interest in restoring Constitutional values, Wheeler created and now heads the National Republican Trust PAC (GOPTrust).