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By Christopher Hitchens

June 28, 1999 | WASHINGTON -- It's always suspicious when Washingtonians start breaking into bad Latin. There may be a quid, you hear them say, and there seems to be a quo. But -- aha -- there's no smoking pro to connect the two. This pseudo-talk combines my least favorite styles: that of the overpaid attorney and that of the overpaid political obfuscator.

Thus, it is not denied that Chinese military-industrial sources managed to transfer an awful lot of money to the Democratic National Committee. Nor is it denied that many tranches of valuable information made their way from American nuclear laboratories into the computer systems of the People's Republic of China. Nor is it denied that large American corporations were eager to share missile and satellite technology with the PRC, and that they, too, were generous to the DNC. All that is denied is that these things have anything to do with one another.

But every one of the Clintonian defenses raises additional suspicions.

The White House has insisted that Chinese espionage is nothing new, and was known to occur under previous Republican administrations. In that case, they had every reason to be vigilant, when all the evidence shows they were not. But then the president claims he was not told of any espionage until March 19 of this year. Not only does this contradict the previous argument -- that Washington was aware of the long-standing problem -- but it clashes with Sandy Berger's claim to have been briefed by Department of Energy intelligence as far back as July 1997 and to have passed on the briefing to Clinton "within a day or two."

Not even Lanny Davis has been able to confect an explanation for this discrepancy. Maybe that's why Clinton finally broke down this weekend and admitted that in fact he had heard about the Chinese espionage threat a bit earlier than acknowledged.

And why exactly, when the FBI asked Justice for permission to tap the computer of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos labs, did Janet Reno's amazing subordinates three times turn down the application? The Clinton administration, though legal measures such as the Anti-Terrorism and Intelligence Authorization acts, has been treating the Fourth Amendment, which was intended to protect Americans from government investigatory excess, as an inconvenience since at least 1996. The chief exhibit in this contempt for the Constitution is the "roving wiretap," whereby any phone to which a suspect is "reasonably proximate" can be invigilated by the FBI. We now know that in 1996 Reno's judicial review panel authorized all 839 wiretap warrants that it received. How did Wen Ho Lee escape that dragnet?

Now, was there anything else going on, between about 1996 and now, that could make the administration at all touchy about learning more about Chinese penetration? Well, there were the numerous Senate hearings at which it was established -- and not denied -- that the DNC and the Clinton-Gore 1996 campaign had shredded such distinction as existed between "hard" and "soft" political donations.

Going back a bit further, there are intimate connections between the Riady Corp. -- a front for Chinese interests -- and Clinton's original financial backers in Arkansas. The Worthen Bank, owned by Clinton's long-time backer Jackson Stephens, was the conduit for a large Riady loan in 1992 -- just in time to save the financially exhausted Clinton campaign. Only Webster Hubbell knows for sure about the provenance of some of this dough.

Next page | "Commercial diplomacy": How the Clintonoids defend their sleazy Chinese ties