"The White House is like a subway. You have to put in coins to open the gates."

Such were the immortal words of one Johnny Chung, who admitted to a Senate committee in 1997 that he funneled $100,000 from the Chinese military to the Democratic National Committee.  In the Clinton White House, it was pay to play all the way.  That either Bill or Hillary had a political life after their treasonous run on Asian piggy banks is a testament to the ever escalating corruption of the American media.

The White House honcho who made the subways run on time – no shock here – was Hillary Clinton.  It was she who convened the secret meeting with adviser Dick Morris in the White House treaty room a month after the Democrats' historic drubbing in November 1994.  Blamed for the debacle, the Clintons were running for their political lives.  To preserve those lives would take huge amounts of money, much of it, if not most, raised and spent illegally.

"The president and his top advisors took control of the DNC and designed a plan to engage in a historically aggressive fund-raising effort, utilizing the DNC as a vehicle for getting around federal election laws," the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, also known as the Thompson Committee, reported in March 1998.  "The DNC ran television advertisements, created under the direct supervision of the president."

The deepest pockets the Clintons plundered belonged to the Riadys, an ethnic Chinese family that worked out of Indonesia.  The Thompson Committee cited any number of large-scale Riady joint ventures in China, their principal partner in the People's Republic being an enterprise called China Resources, "a company wholly-owned and operated by the PRC government."  The Riadys had invested in Bill Clinton back in Arkansas and bailed him out during the 1992 primary campaign.  As payback, they were allowed to put their man John Huang in the Commerce Department.

And what were Huang's talents?  A letter sent by an Asian outreach advocate on the stationery of the then-president pro tem of the California state Senate was frank to a fault: "John is the Riady family's top priority for placement because he is like one of their own."  The Riady family, in case anyone needed reminding, "invested heavily in the Clinton campaign."  To some, those were credentials enough.

Huang's actual work was icing on the cake. The Thompson Committee makes this striking admission: "[a]lthough Huang's first day at Commerce was July 18, 1994, he was granted his first security clearance in January 1994."

Huang proved his worth in June 1994.  With Clinton crony Webster Hubbell on the ropes after a scandal forced him out of his job in the Justice Department, Huang arranged a $100,000 Riady payout to Hubbell.  This occurred two days after Huang and James Riady met with the president in the Oval Office and a week after Hillary met with Hubbell.  That payout – and $300,000 more – helped buy Hubbell's silence.  Despite a ton of legal pressure, he never talked.

It should have surprised no one that the Clintons would head for Indonesia a week after the November 1994 debacle.  They saw it coming and planned ahead.  Not only did the Clintons have to impress the Riadys on their own home turf, but they also had to start squeezing the CEOs accompanying them in a more systematic way.  It was about this time that the $100,000 donation to travel with the Clintons morphed from a discreet expectation into the price of admission.

The Thompson Committee described what happened during the next two years.  "The president and his aides demeaned the offices of the president and vice president, took advantage of minority groups, pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well."  This was business as usual for Bill and Hillary Clinton.  "Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions," concluded the Thompson Committee, " much of it from foreign sources."

Nothing the Clintons have done in the last thirty years matches the scope of their treachery during this two-year period.  In the way of example, among those who enjoyed an intimate "coffee" with the president was one Wang Jun, chair of Poly Technologies, a company controlled by the People's Liberation Army.  One of Poly Technologies' profit centers was satellite production.  Another was the "importation and distribution of semi-automatic rifles for the U.S. domestic market."  Between 1987 and 1993, the company and its affiliates sold more than $200 million's worth of these guns in the United States.  Clinton pal Charlie Trie had greased the Wang Jun meeting with a $50,000 payment.

To the president's humble credit, as the Thompson Committee would later report, Clinton did admit that the meeting with Wang Jun was "clearly inappropriate."  The president did not apologize, however, for signing waivers for four more satellite launches by Chinese rockets on that same February 1996 day.  The president approved these waivers despite reports the month before that China continued to export nuclear technology to Pakistan and missiles to Iran, the latter deal suspected of being brokered by Wang Jun.

Just a week or so after Wang Jun's excellent Washington adventure, a Chinese Long March 3B rocket carrying the Loral-built Intelsat 708 satellite crashed just after liftoff and killed or injured at least sixty people in a nearby village.  This was the third Long March failure in the previous three years involving U.S.-built satellite payloads.

Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz, the largest single donor to the Clinton campaign, dispatched a Loral-led review team to China to assess the February 1996 failure of the Long March 3B rocket and suggest refinements.  The Cox Committee would later describe Schwartz's actions as "an unlicensed defense service for the PRC that resulted in the improvement of the reliability of the PRC's military rockets and ballistic missiles."  The White House pulled serious strings to prevent Schwartz from being prosecuted.

In the most outrageous deal of all, two months before the election, the president "unilaterally" declared a new 1.7-million-acre national monument in Southern Utah.  CNN's Wolf Blitzer did not shy from the implicit controversy.  He reported that the people of Utah were "furious."  They claimed that it was "a land grab" by the federal government "at the economic expense of the state."

Blitzer raised the issue of coal, perhaps $1 trillion's worth of clean, low-sulfur coal that would never be mined.  Blitzer, however, did not know the deeper significance of the coal.  Clinton did.  Said the president of this grand environmental gesture, "We can't have mines everywhere, and we shouldn't have mines that threaten our national treasures."  No, not everywhere, just in Indonesia.  In a stroke of the pen, Clinton had handed the Riadys a monopoly on the world's supply of low-sulfur coal.

Although Blitzer did not make the connection, the FBI did.  As an FBI agent observed after his interview with John Huang, "HUANG laughed in response to questions concerning j. riady's interest in Utah coal restrictions."

Huang and the Clintons and their cronies are laughing still.  They have convinced some healthy percentage of the Republican establishment that making a crude comment eleven years ago is a greater sin than betraying America for campaign cash.