by Rod D. Martin
May 29, 1998

We have found the smoking gun.

In fact, thanks largely to the reporting of Washington Times national security correspondent Bill Gertz, we’ve found the most grievous scandal in the history of the Republic.

The President, in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, overruled the stern, unanimous opposition of his advisors, the Pentagon and the State Department to sell to a Chinese Military Intelligence front vital, classified missile and satellite technology. Among those things sold by the President: American encryption chips and the technology to blind our spy satellites and launch a sneak attack.

Johnny Chung has told federal investigators that at least $300,000 were funneled through him alone (minus what he skimmed), by way of the daughter of China’s top military commander. Another $1.1 million came from Bernard Schwartz, the Chairman of Loral, a company which at the time was under criminal investigation for exporting classified technology to China and which, after Schwartz’s “donation”, received a Presidential waiver to export more of the same. That waiver eviscerated the earlier criminal probe: it had the effect of, after the fact, making Loral’s earlier actions legal.

The more one looks, the more one finds. It turns out, for instance, that Clinton personally moved licensing authority for the transfer of satellite technology from State and Defense to Ron Brown’s anything-goes Commerce Department, home of that dark prince of fundraisers John Huang. It was Huang who arranged the Feb. 8, 1996 visit of arms dealer Wang Jun to Brown’s office at Commerce, as well as Wang’s “coffee” meeting that day with the President, the very day that Clinton approved four Chinese missile launches. This was the same week that China was threatening Taiwan with missile “tests,” the same week Beijing warned the U.S. that American interference would result in a nuclear attack on Los Angeles.

And this may be only the tip of the iceberg.

There appears to be no issue of “what did the President know and when did he know it.” The President personally granted every benefit China or its lackeys received. He personally solicited much of the money, and personally hired the men who solicited all of the rest. He personally placed those men in positions where they could circumvent normal security measures, and then personally changed the security measures to further benefit their efforts. Even if he wasn’t bribed, he nevertheless irrevocably gave state secrets to China after knowingly taking their money, and this author frankly has a hard time seeing the distinction.

And then there is the issue of complicity. The Justice Department is believed to have on tape intercepts of conversations in which Chung and his clients in Beijing discuss the plan for buying Bill Clinton. This would certainly explain Janet Reno’s continued, illegal refusal to appoint an Independent Counsel; this is what Fred Thompson and his Senate Committee were after last fall and never got. Then there are the 19 Democrat Congressmen on the Burton Committee, led by Henry Waxman, who have twice voted against granting the immunity needed to obtain testimony from four witnesses capable of giving details of this apparent bribery and treason. And there is Richard Sullivan, the DNC Finance Director during the relevant period, who now admits “I had a sense that [Chung] might be taking money from them and giving it to us.” Oh what a tangled web they’ve weaved.

Some Democrats think they can laugh this off. They cannot. When, as the Washington Times‘ Wesley Pruden put it, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Joe Biden and Tom Daschle raise a collective eyebrow on a single day,” it’s time to wake up. Likewise when the House of Representatives feels compelled to vote 417-4 demanding that the President give away no new technology while in China next month, the time for pretense has ended. No greater scandal has ever faced this nation; if the Democrats don’t realize this, come November they may find themselves in the position of Nixon’s supporters in 1974.

The sad fact is, as Christians warned, a man who would cheat on his wife would in fact cheat on his country. Liberals, who have steadfastly denied any connection between Clinton’s character and his job performance, have been caught short.

Yet though he has no character, Bill Clinton has acted true to his beliefs. Clinton the President acts just as did Clinton the Oxford man, who “loathed the [American] military,” led protests against his country on foreign soil, and was an officer in an antiwar group funded by the KGB. Clinton has always found a way to support whichever foreign country happened to be the leading Communist power at the time, and his beliefs have consistently translated into policy at home, be it the nationalization of health care or the dismantling of American defenses. It has always been clear that he was faithful to his only obvious cause, himself. It just hasn’t been as clear that he had another cause as well.

But it is imminently clear now. It will become radically clearer when, on global television, the highest ranking double-agent in Western history stands smiling with his paymasters in Tiananmen Square. Whitewater was and is hard to understand; “missiles for money” is not. And like Benedict Arnold, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs and Jonathan Pollard before him, Bill Clinton may well there fall.