Huang Helped to Raise Funds While at Agency

WASHINGTON — With the assistance of the Democratic Party, Clinton administration appointee John Huang participated in raising political donations in 1995 while serving as a government official who was prohibited by law from soliciting campaign funds, according to newly available records and interviews.

Huang, the central figure in Justice Department and congressional investigations into campaign finance abuses, helped generate at least $52,000 from four Asian American donors in the months before he left the Commerce Department to become a full-time fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee.

On at least three occasions, the DNC listed Huang’s wife, Jane, as the “solicitor” for large donations even though party officials recalled that she had no involvement in fund-raising. DNC officials now acknowledge that Jane Huang’s name appears on the donor tracking forms because it would have been an admission of wrongdoing to credit the contributions to John Huang, a deputy assistant Commerce secretary at the time.

“They can’t say it was John Huang [soliciting funds] while he was at Commerce,” said a former top DNC officer. “ . . . What happened is that they got Huang involved [and] they had to cover it.”

Huang, a Glendale resident, has maintained through his lawyers that he did nothing improper. One of his Washington attorneys, Ty Cobb, said Huang “conducted himself appropriately at the Commerce Department. I’m not in a position to comment beyond that.”

A source close to Huang said he did not direct anyone at the DNC to attribute the donations to his wife. The source added that by referring potential donors to the DNC Huang did not violate laws that prevented him from directly soliciting contributions.

However, the links between Huang and the contributions are extensive. The four donors in question were Huang associates from Asian business circles. While at the Commerce Department, he was in contact with at least three of them as they were giving the money. Moreover, after he moved to the DNC as finance vice chairman, he was the fund-raiser credited with all of their subsequent donations.

Mi R. Ahn, one of the donors, said Huang encouraged her to financially support the Democratic Party during her telephone conversations with him in his Commerce Department office during the spring and summer of 1995.

“He said, ‘With the elections coming up, it would be helpful if you get more involved,’ ” recalled Ahn, president of Pan Metal Corp. in Los Angeles, in a telephone interview. “He said to continue to be supportive.”

A DNC staffer in California called her to arrange the donation, Ahn said. Her subsequent $10,000 check was credited as having been solicited by Jane Huang after it arrived.

The other donors are reportedly in Indonesia and could not be reached for comment.

The donations raise further questions about whether Huang and the Democrats had politicized his position in government before the 1996 campaign, using it to help bring in money to the party while, as some allege, providing helpful inside-government guidance for select business supporters in return.

The records specifically appear to challenge the DNC’s insistence that it had no knowledge at the time of any of Huang’s improper campaign fund-raising, which is now a focus of both the congressional and federal investigations.

Possible Legal, Political Issues

The pattern also raises possible legal, as well as political, issues.

The Hatch Act states that federal government employees “may not solicit, accept or receive political contributions,” except under special circumstances, which did not apply in Huang’s case. Under federal regulations, “solicit” is defined as “to request expressly of another person that he or she contribute something to a candidate, a campaign, a political party or partisan group.”

Huang joined the Democratic National Committee as a full-time fund-raiser on Dec. 5, 1995. After that, he raised $3.4 million for the party and its campaign last year, mostly from the Asian American community. The DNC has since determined that nearly half of the money was improperly raised or from questionable donors, some of them from overseas, and will be returned.

But part of the sprawling Justice Department and congressional investigations are now focused on Huang’s previous 17-month stint at the Commerce Department, where the former chief U.S. executive for the Indonesia-based Lippo Group took a mid-level position after moving from the private to the public sector.

The Commerce Department’s inspector general and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee’s civil service subcommittee is particularly reviewing Huang’s government work for possible violations of the Hatch Act. The congressional panel, headed by Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), plans to hold hearings early this summer.

In the months before Huang left the Commerce Department, the DNC received four curious donations: the $10,000 from Ahn, $12,000 from Indonesian businessman Kenneth R. Wynn and $15,000 each from Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata, an Indonesian couple who lived in Virginia.

All Donors Were Huang Associates

All the donors were associates of Huang. Three of them--Ahn and the Wiriadinatas--had never donated to the DNC before. And when three of the donations came in during 1995, the DNC attributed the money on internal tracking forms to Jane Huang, who is listed as “solicitor,” according to sources familiar with DNC documents.

It could not be determined who was credited with soliciting the Arief Wiriadinata contribution.

Current and former DNC officials said in interviews that Jane Huang had no fund-raising role besides accompanying her husband to DNC dinners and other social events.

Former DNC Chairman Donald L. Fowler said Jane Huang “clearly” was not involved in fund-raising.

Said another Democratic official: “No one at the DNC can recall her doing any fund-raising work. She played no role. She was a traditional housewife. She was back home in Glendale with the kids.”

Huang’s wife declined to comment for this story. Reached at her white stucco home perched high in the Glendale hills, she said, “I don’t grant any interviews to anybody.”

Telephone Messages From Ahn

While Jane Huang appeared to have no involvement with the donors, her husband did.

Government records show John Huang received three telephone messages at the Commerce Department from Ahn during a three-week period before she made a $10,000 donation to the DNC on June 15, 1995, for the Democrats’ annual fund-raising gala in Washington.

Ahn and Huang had become acquainted in the Los Angeles Asian American business community when he was president of Lippo Bank there. She said she talked to him in the calls about her disagreements with the Democratic Party, and that he encouraged her to provide financial support anyway.

Ahn’s name appears at the top of a June 23, 1995, DNC memo seeking White House invitations for donors to a reception and entertainment after a state dinner. The memo to the White House cited her recent $10,000 donation and her role as an “associate of John Huang.”

Similarly, Huang was a business colleague of Wynn, who served as the chief executive officer and managing director of Lippoland Development in Indonesia. Lippoland is a unit of the Lippo Group conglomerate, overseeing various property holdings in Indonesia, including Lippo Village, the ambitious suburban development outside Jakarta. Wynn, who left the Lippo firm in 1995, still works in Indonesia and could not be reached.

DNC finance officials said they had no knowledge of Wynn or how he came to contribute to the DNC other than through his connections to Huang and Lippo.

In one of his few public comments on the fund-raising controversy, Huang acknowledged last fall that he was responsible for steering the Wiriadinatas to the DNC. Soraya’s father, Hashim Ning, a wealthy Indonesian businessman, was a partner of Indonesia’s Riady family, which runs Lippo.

“I developed a friendship with Arief and Soraya,” Huang said in a written reply to questions from The Times. “They expressed an interest in supporting the Democratic Party and the president, and I suggested that they contribute to the DNC.”

More Donations After Joining DNC

Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata made their first contributions on Nov. 9, $15,000 each, federal election records show. Soraya’s was credited at the DNC to Jane Huang.

Huang joined the DNC a month later. Seven days after his move, on Dec. 12, the Wiriadinatas each made three additional donations, totaling $100,000. Their contributions this time were credited to John Huang.

The Wiriadinatas kept giving, often in connection with Huang fund-raising events, even after they moved back to Indonesia shortly thereafter. Their total reached $450,000; the DNC returned all of it last November because of questions about the couple’s payment of U.S. taxes and failure to return to the United States.

The money donated by Wynn and the Wiriadinatas while Huang remained at the Commerce Department went toward a Nov. 2, 1995, dinner at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington featuring Vice President Al Gore. The event, held exclusively for a small group of Asian American leaders, was intended to demonstrate the fund-raising potential within the Asian-Pacific American community.

A DNC memo on Oct. 27, 1995--six days before the Gore event--indicates that Huang was to be enlisted to help raise money for the dinner.

In addition to steering donations in his final months at the Commerce Department, Huang helped bring in at least an additional $58,000 while he was still a Commerce official but working at the DNC in a leave-of-absence arrangement. The propriety of this fund-raising under the Hatch Act is the subject of federal and congressional investigations.

Huang left the Commerce Department on Dec. 3, 1995, filled out his paperwork at the DNC the following day and started work there on Dec. 5. Officially, however, Huang’s last day at the Commerce Department was Jan. 16, 1996.

Commerce Department officials said they were unable to determine why Huang took the leave. Because the leave was unpaid, the overlap between Huang’s tenure at the Commerce Department and the DNC may be viewed as relatively benign. But some congressional investigators take a harsher view.

“We’re taking it as a given that he violated the Hatch Act the day he went to the DNC and started his fund-raising because he was still a Commerce employee,” said a congressional aide familiar with the House inquiry.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue in Washington contributed to this story.