By Paul Sperry
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON -- The day after the Thompson committee hearings on Chinagate kicked off in the Senate, a lawyer driving a white Lexus pulled up to Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie's home in Little Rock, Ark.

It was July 2, 1997, and FBI agents conducting surveillance on Trie's house watched, powerlessly, as Trie's secretary, Maria "Dia" Mapili, and the lawyer loaded the car with four boxes, which agents later confirmed contained documents under subpoena by both a federal grand jury and the Senate.

Earlier that day, agents thought they had a green light to search Trie's home to stop the further destruction of evidence that they'd discovered while sifting through Trie's garbage cans.

Mixed in with fish heads and other garbage were bits of key records that investigators had sought in their criminal probe of 1996 Clinton-Gore fund-raising abuses.

After drying out and piecing together the shreds of paper, they restored checks from Asian donors to President Clinton's legal defense fund, Democratic National Committee donor lists, travel records for Chinese money men and statements from Chinese bank accounts. There also was a FedEx slip showing the White House had sent two pounds of documents to Trie just two months earlier.

But, at the last minute, Justice officials denied their request for a search warrant. In fact, FBI special agent Kevin Sheridan was back in Washington arguing against the high-level punt at the same time Mapili and her lawyer, who'd been tipped off to the scheduled search that day, were carting off documents.

Scrambling to recover the documents, special FBI agent Daniel Wehr asked for permission to stop the Lexus as it sped off. Justice officials turned that request down, too.

Agents learned later that Mapili, who had no prior counsel, had quickly and conveniently lawyered up with one of Arkansas' best -- W.H. Taylor, who is Don Tyson's personal lawyer. Tyson, the chicken king who heads Fayetteville, Ark.-based Tyson Foods, is a big Clinton supporter.

Remarkably, Taylor had driven almost four hours to Little Rock from Fayetteville to help Mapili cart off subpoenaed documents.

"That's just not a coincidence," said I.C. Smith, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Arkansas at the time.

"Here you've got lawyers stepping over one another there in Little Rock, and of all the people, she hooks up with Don Tyson's personal lawyer," Smith said in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily. "She didn't make that decision herself."

So who hooked her up with Tyson's lawyer? Again, Justice officials weren't interested in investigating.

Before subpoenaing Mapili for Trie's records, Smith had tried to get a device installed to record the numbers pulsed to and from Mapili's phone to see who she was talking to. But Washington objected.

But that's not all.

After agents complained about the boxes of documents taking flight from Trie's house, Justice sent a lawyer, William Corcoran, to Little Rock to meet with Taylor to review the documents.

Only, the meeting never took place.

"Corcoran overslept the morning of the meeting, and Taylor left and went back to Fayetteville with the documents," Smith said.

In sworn statements on Oct. 21 and 22, 1997 -- after the Senate hearings had ended -- Mapili confirmed agents' worst fears by admitting she destroyed and hid documents on orders from Trie, who had fled to China. She hid some documents in a credenza, and others under Trie's bed.

Finally, on Oct. 23, 1997, Justice officials OK'd a search warrant, and agents obtained documents sufficient to indict Trie. (The indictment was scheduled for November 1998, but officials postponed it until January 1999 – after the mid-term congressional elections.) Trie was later convicted in a plea deal that spared him jail in exchange for his cooperation in further investigations.

All told, Trie gave $640,000 in illegal donations to the DNC and Clinton-Gore reelection effort, and $460,000 more in illegal donations to Clinton's legal defense fund. He made the donations to buy access to Clinton for Chinese benefactors such as Ng Lap Seng, a shady Macau tycoon, and Wang Jun, a Beijing arms dealer. They got the access, and possibly more.

Even so, Clinton was never a target, and agents were blocked from following any leads back to him.

"I was told by Laura Ingersoll that we would not pursue any matter relating to the solicitation or payment of funds for access to the presidency," Wehr testified before the Senate Sept. 22, 1999.

Why? "That's the way the American political process works," Wehr said Ingersoll told him.

"I was scandalized by that answer," Wehr said.

Ingersoll, who does not recall the conversation, was the first of many supervisors of Justice's campaign finance task force. A relatively green prosecutor, she was hand-picked by Lee Radek, who runs the task force as Public Integrity Section chief.

Radek, who privately told FBI officials at the outset of the probe in 1996 that he was under political "pressure" to throttle the probe to save then-Attorney General Janet Reno's job, was the intellectual muscle behind Reno's stubborn refusal not to turn the case over to an independent counsel.

Roberta Parker, lead FBI agent in Washington on the Trie case, also was compelled to testify in 1999.

She swore: "I was told [by Ingersoll] that we would not take into consideration the Presidential Legal Expense Trust [PLET] issue, and that we would not take into consideration the Senate subpoena obstruction issue for the search warrant."

She said Ingersoll wouldn't let agents use the illegal PLET checks from Trie as evidence for probable cause to search Trie's home.

'No doubt about' cover-up

All this begs the question: Did Justice prosecutors, under the orders of Reno and Radek, fix the investigation in favor of Clinton?

"There's no doubt about it," Smith said in a lengthy phone interview from his Virginia home.

He claims that Justice and White House lawyers worked "hand and glove" to bury the investigation.

"When you have W.H. Taylor driving all the way from Fayetteville to represent a little Filipino woman [Mapili] who can hardly find Fayetteville on a map, there's no question there was collusion," Smith charged.

Added another veteran FBI agent who worked on the case, but wished to go unnamed: "The setbacks were too orchestrated to write off as high-level incompetence. It was intentional obstruction. We were all dumbfounded."

"And the cover-up continues," the agent said.

Republicans such as Sen. Fred Thompson and Rep. Dan Burton, who have conducted Chinagate hearings, have charged that Reno and her aides were "blocking" for the president or "covering up" evidence that pointed to the White House.

But this is the first time street agents on the case have gone that far.

Ingersoll, who eventually was removed from the task force, says she denied agents' requests for search warrants because they lacked "probable cause."

For his part, Radek argues that he's handcuffed by toothless campaign-finance laws, and is "desperately looking for crimes to accuse these people of and bring them to justice."

Reno still maintains she conducted a "fair," "honest" and "thorough" probe.

The operational plan

But Smith doesn't buy it and points to a written "operational plan" as a potential source of leaks to the White House on task force strategy.

He says the plan, which is about a quarter-inch thick, was the playbook for task force prosecutors.

"There was at least the potential for it to be shared with the White House counsel's office," which closely monitored the probe for the president.

Smith also says the plan, which took a long time to put together, delayed the launch of the probe in 1997.

"It was a nuisance, because instead of agents going out there interviewing people, they were putting together this operational plan," he said. "And the decision-making on the plan was tortuous in itself."

"So weeks and weeks went by there when very little investigating was being done," Smith added. "Everybody was trying to come up with this operational plan," which was finally completed in mid-1997.

Agents also charge that senior Justice officials did not want them to succeed, and did everything in their power to trip them up.

Unlike other investigations involving the FBI, Justice lawyers had unprecedented control in this case. Agents had to clear every move through them.

"This wasn't the typical FBI investigation where you follow the leads yourself," Smith said. "You had to clear all your interviews through the Justice Department."

Veteran agents were told who they could interview as witnesses, how they should interview them and when they could put them before the grand jury.

For example, Smith recalls Ingersoll initially turning down an April 23, 1997, request by his team to subpoena Arkansan Lorin Fleming, a potentially key witness in the Trie case.

Smith says department lawyers even sabotaged the testimony of a key witness cultivated by his agents in Little Rock.

Dwight Linkous, an Arkansas "mover and shaker," was a critical Trie witness who Smith said was "treated shabbily by department lawyers."

Duffle bags full of cash

Linkous, a former Little Rock city director who helped install Clinton pal Webster Hubbell as mayor, was prepared to tell the grand jury of how Trie smuggled briefcases and duffle bags full of $100-dollar bills from China.

In one instance, he told agents Trie offered cash to Little Rock business leaders to help Ng and other Chinese buy the old Camelot Hotel in Little Rock. In another, he paid $30,000 to Clinton aide Mark Middleton to help broker the Camelot deal (which eventually fell through). And in yet another example, Trie gave $100,000 in Chinese cash to the DNC in 1994 so that Ng and other Chinese could dine with Clinton.

Yet before presenting Linkous to the grand jury in Washington, Justice lawyer Corcoran "hadn't even read the 302s we'd written" summarizing the FBI's deposition of Linkous.

Instead of massaging Linkous for information on the stand, Corcoran questioned his credibility, Smith said.

"It was a conscious effort to discredit this guy before the grand jury and not ask any of the pertinent questions," he said.

The witness just "clammed up after that," Smith said.

"We had many stumbling blocks in this investigation," agreed FBI agent Sheridan, who got so fed up he left the case.

The politicized probe convinced Smith, a 25-year veteran, to retire in 1998.

The task-force personnel turnover, both at the bottom and top, has worked in Clinton's favor.

When it came time to work out sentencing for Trie, the investigators squeezing him for more information weren't even involved in his investigation, agents say.

'Didn't even read file'

"They didn't even read the case file," one agent said. "How can you debrief Charlie Trie without reading the case file?"

Most of the dozen agents and lawyers who deposed Trie in 1999 were new to the case and had "less than a year in," the agent said. "That's kind of scary."

Smith, who can translate both Mandarin and Cantonese, says the new investigators mistakenly thought Ng Lap Seng, Trie's Chinese benefactor, and Mr. Wu were different people. They didn't realize they are the same name in different Chinese dialects.

As time went on, fewer investigators knew much about the president's friends from Arkansas and how they were connected in a web of dirty-dealing.

"They didn't have the wiring diagram," Smith said. As a result, interviews with witnesses and perpetrators were "poorly done" and "incomplete."

"There's a rhythm to investigations," he added, "and there was never any rhythm developed in the campaign-finance investigations."

Adding to the lack of continuity, the task force has gone through six chief prosecutors in less than five years.

Ingersoll was replaced by Charles LaBella, who Reno ousted for David Vicinanzo after LaBella complained about political foot-dragging. And Vicinanzo, in turn, was replaced by Scott Fredericksen, who backed out at the last minute and was replaced by Robert Conrad, who was replaced in February by Michael Horowitz, a Justice bureaucrat.

"Clearly there was no real interest in pursuing this thing at the department, particularly after Chuck LaBella was removed," Smith said.

LaBella, who left in 1998, urged Reno to turn the case over to an outside prosecutor.

In a departing memo to her, he complained: "If these allegations involved anyone other than the president, vice president, senior White House or DNC and Clinton-Gore '96 officials, an appropriate investigation would have commenced months ago without hesitation."

"It's one thing to fix a public-corruption case for political reasons. But this one doesn't just involve politicians...."

"People at the department didn't take a lot of the intelligence and national security stuff very seriously when it came up," complained one FBI agent who worked on the case. "We screamed and yelled and screamed and yelled, but they wouldn't see the forest for the trees."

"Let me put it this way," the agent said, "what the public knows is just the tip of the iceberg."