'Hordes' of Chinese demanded post-election favors

WASHINGTON -- "Hordes" of Chinese officials marched into the Arkansas state capitol demanding favors soon after Bill Clinton was elected president, a former Arkansas state auditor told WorldNetDaily.

"We never had a single Chinese visitor come until Clinton became president," said Julia Hughes Jones, who served as then-Gov. Clinton's state auditor. Starting in November 1992, high-ranking officials from the Chinese consulate in Houston beat a path to her door.

"They were in my office at least once a week from then on," said Jones, whose office was next door to Clinton's. And they meant business.

"I had this one Chinese guy from the embassy come in my office -- tall, heavy-set, mean-looking, but very well-dressed, wearing an expensive black overcoat," Jones recalled. "My secretary told me there was this man out front to see me and he was scary-looking, and didn't speak very good English."

But he knew enough to get across what he wanted, she says. In a meeting, he demanded that Jones broker deals for China with Wal-Mart Stores and Tyson Foods, both based in Arkansas.

"I thought it was really strange," she said.

Jones now figures long-time Clinton fund-raiser Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie had made promises to Chinese officials on behalf of Clinton on his many trips to China before the election. And the officials were following up.

Clinton announced he was running for the White House in the fall of 1991, but told his old friend Trie sometime earlier. Upon the news, Trie sold his Little Rock restaurant and started going to China every month, says Jones, who traveled with Trie on one trip.

A secret FBI report says Trie, convicted last year of breaking fund-raising laws, phoned the Chinese consulate in Houston right after Clinton told him of his plans to run. He asked for fund-raising help for Clinton.

"He called the consulate to seek its assistance in organizing a political fund-raising event for Clinton," said the FBI report obtained by WorldNetDaily. He also phoned the Chinese Embassy in Washington and the Chinese consulate in New York. In addition, he "attended a dinner with PRC (People's Republic of China) consular officials in Los Angeles," the report said.

As reported by WorldNetDaily last week, Trie set up three businesses in Changchun, China, a city Pentagon officials suspect supports research operations for the People's Liberation Army's deadly biological weapons program. Trie confessed to FBI agents that he had brokered the sale of a 132-gallon germ-fermenting tank to a Beijing-run biological research institute in Changchun.

In late October 1992, Clinton proclaimed Changchun the sister city of Little Rock. The next month, Changchun officials -- including Dr. Zhang Jianming, director of the biological research lab -- paid a visit to the state capital. One day that month, Jones says she got a fax from Changchun and handed it to Clinton.

"I caught him out in the hall," she said. "He read it and stuck it in his pocket."

Clinton and Trie go way back. The then-governor attended the opening of his Fu Lin Chinese Restaurant and ate lunch there three or four times a week. Trie followed Clinton to Washington and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for him and Vice President Al Gore out of an office in the Watergate Hotel.

Trie is no stranger to Gore. In February 1996, Trie had breakfast with Gore in Washington the day after Trie's crooked fund-raising partner John Huang raised $1.1 million at a fund-raiser. And in April 1996, Trie told the FBI he helped organize an illegal fund-raiser for Gore at a Buddhist temple near Los Angeles. Gore hosted the event, which raised $140,000 from nuns and monks. The laundered money was later returned.

Trie will get an opportunity to explain his suspicious activities in China in congressional hearings set for this week.

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