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Phony Campaign Finance Scandal Exposed
One More Nail in the Buddhist Temple FauxGate's Coffin:
American Lawyer's Roger Parloff Expertly Debunks Hsi Lai Temple "FauxGate"
by Tamara Baker

Tuesday, May 2, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- You've seen it, I've seen it, we've all seen it.

For four years now, the Beltway press buffoons have been taking RNC faxes on the Hsi Lai fundraiser attended by Al Gore and used them to create a "campaign finance scandal", one in which, as in "ChinaFauxGate" the specter of race-baiting plays an important and ugly role.

Look how lovingly the RNC's promotional films focus on Big Al fraternizing with those -- gasp --CHINESE MONKS! This is just tailor-made to rile up the Southern Baptist racists and the McVeigh wing of the GOP. Though I don't think this will play well at all with California's Asian bloc: a sure sign that the GOP has written off the Golden State.

Trouble is, once you boil away all the racist nonsense and rhetoric, there's nothing left to fling against the Vice President. Nothing.

The latest of the TempleGate debunkings comes to us courtesy of American Lawyer magazine. In AL's May issue, Senior Writer Roger Parloff examines the alleged case against the Vice President.

And finds it baseless.

In his in-depth article, Mr. Parloff thoroughly rebuts the constant charges raised by Republicans, their media allies, and conspiracy buffs, that Vice President Gore broke campaign finance laws during that visit to a Buddhist temple in 1996. The story takes a careful look at the allegations surrounding Gore and other key Democratic fund-raisers and concludes that Gore didn't break any laws whatsoever in connection with the temple event.

In fact, Parloff states, "A skeptical look at the key charges against Gore reveals that they hinge on fuzzy thinking, malevolent assumptions, and the intransigent refusal to credit exonerating evidence."

Parloff examines a key question in the controversy: did Al Gore know, or should he reasonably have known, whether the Hsi Lai temple luncheon organized by John Huang and fellow Democrat supporter Maria Hsia, was a fund-raiser or just a community outreach event? Parloff says, decisively, that the answer to that question is NO. He reports in his article that the evidence is "overwhelming" that the temple event was never planned as a fund-raiser.

The article lists the chain of circumstances in March and April 1996 that brought Gore, Huang and Hsia together at the temple. The article discloses that even if the event was a fund-raiser, there are disincentives but no laws forbidding fund-raisers at church or temple. This article also debunks as unfounded the criticism Gore took for taking contributions from temple monastics with "sworn poverty vows"; it turns out that the Hsi Lai temple's monastics aren't required to take vows of poverty. And while Huang and Hsia have been convicted of charges relating to illegal campaign-donation schemes, concerns have been raised that Huang's conviction owed more to GOP partisanship than actual wrongdoing, while Hsia's conviction, as mentioned in a previous Ampol article, was done on such shaky and railroaded "evidence" that her judge not only had tried to get the case dismissed, but has also reserved the rarely-used judicial right to dismiss Hsia's charges even after conviction.

Even the higly publicized disagreement among senior-level Justice Department officials who had urged Janet Reno to appoint an independent counsel to investigate has been, according to Parloff's article, greatly exaggerated by the mainstream press and Gore's enemies. Parloff's article reports that those intramural disagreements have much more to do with the requirements of the independent counsel statute than with the alleged strength of a case against Gore.

The Beltway "journalists," taking their marching orders from Jim Nicholson of the RNC, have been hammering Gore for eight long years with lies and twisted half-truths.

Will they be as assiduous in correcting their slanted stories as they were in creating them in the first place?