China Never Forgets Clintons

There is a small opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today that is important, but will not be widely read:  China Was Bill Clinton's Russia. I had forgotten that there were investigations of Bill Clinton's ties to China during his campaign.  It hasn't stopped, and President Obama appealed directly to foreign governments in Germany and Japan to get their support in preventing the election of Donald Trump.

The Daily Mail has a good story on the background of the Clinton money, and the story is more current that we would think.  Ng Lap Seng, a billionaire paying money into the Clinton campaign though an Arkansas Chinese restaurant owner who was arrested.  After that Ng decided to become unavailable for comment until 2016.  Congress was trying to get him in for hearings all that time.  This, and the case of Charlie Trie and John Huang regularly offered their services to Congress, also investigated and witnesses testified about conduit payments to the Democratic Party.  The Washington Post cited this story in 1997.  If you search on his name in the U.S. House of Representatives website, there is a complete version to piece together of all the people involved.  None of them were ambassadors to the U.S.

If subtlety is the measure of whether investigations are conducted probably, we should note that the Chinese are careful to follow the laws of the places where they "help the parties" in their elections.  The Russians are not as careful, but unless you are not thinking clearly it is hard to believe they are not equal to China.  They are not stupid enough to have their senior representatives coming to meetings discussing campaign support.  If they do it, they would do it through third parties who were not official representatives.  Otherwise, we would have to believe that the Russians are stupid and the Chinese are not.  I don't think so.

If we translate that into public policy vs political strategy, the answer for the Republicans is to stonewall the whole story of the Russian involvement in the U.S election and it will die just as fast as the Clinton campaign money did.  Hillary Clinton, candidate, got money from Chinese businessmen who were different than the ones previously accused.  The Chinese have not stopped and the Russians have not stopped either.  The hypocrisy has not stopped either.  Republican Congressmen who pretend to go along with the Democratics trying to investigate this mess, should turn their attention to both sides of the story.  Maybe some of them have things they would not like to have investigated.  I doubt that any of them really want any kind of investigation and need to be sure it doesn't happen.  The fallout may bleed over into all kinds of cases of foreign involvement that none of them would like.