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According to Huang, who worked both for Lippo and as Stephens' vice president at Worthen, he first met Clinton when the Arkansas Governor traveled to Hong Kong on a trade mission. The two met again at the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta. "A group of our friends, Asian-community people, went to attend the convention," Huang said last week in a deposition taken in a civil suit against the Commerce Department brought by Judicial Watch, a nonprofit conservative group investigating Democratic fund-raising practices. "So in one of the hotel lobbies we shake hands, and that was it."
But not the end of it. In 1992, Huang became a fund raiser for Clinton's presidential campaign. "I was helping out to drum up Asian-community support," Huang said in the deposition. He volunteered for the job, he said, because Clinton "had been a friend to us since the Arkansas time, [and] we feel obligated to help a friend." But Huang added that his politics could be bipartisan. "I gave money," he said, "to the Republicans also."
By 1994 and 1995, Huang was moving seamlessly from his role as vice chairman of a Lippo Group bank in California to become a specialist in Asian trade for the Commerce Department. As a going-away gift from Lippo, Huang received $780,000 in salary and bonuses just before joining the government.
Today, Administration officials say they never bothered to investigate Huang's overseas connections because such checks aren't needed when a prospective federal employee has lived in the U.S. for at least the past five years. But David Harris, a former top official of the Canadian intelligence service who has studied the infiltration of Chinese spies into North American commerce, describes Huang's free pass as "horrendous." It is particularly disturbing, Harris says, because Lippo's shared ownership of a Hong Kong bank with the Beijing government could have opened an intelligence gusher to the People's Republic. "This failure could undermine the confidence of U.S. allies," Harris says. "Given Huang's history and background, it was unthinkable that an intelligence service wouldn't have done a foreign field check on him."
Once Huang joined Commerce, his appointment paid dividends. Secretary Brown led a trade mission to China the month after Huang arrived and returned with a $1 billion power-plant project to be financed by the Lippo Group and managed by Entergy Corp., a Louisiana-based concern with heavy interests in Arkansas. Commerce officials say Huang disqualified himself from any matters involving Indonesia because of his work for Lippo. But congressional investigators have uncovered documents to dispute that. They show that shortly after Huang joined the department, he attended two meetings at which officials from several federal agencies discussed ways to strengthen trade relations with Indonesia.