Yah Lin Charlie Trie

Carrying envelopes stuffed with bundles of $50 and $100 bills, a slightly built man with a stringy mustache left his Lincoln Plaza Hotel room in Monterey Park on an unusual quest: He was looking for volunteers to accept $10,000 in cash. Antonio Pan's trip on Aug. 15, 1996, took him through a number of middle-income Asian American communities in greater Los Angeles, where he stopped at businesses and called on distant acquaintances. He found one taker at a scrap-metal export shop in Alhambra.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno on Thursday described herself as "mad" over the belated White House discovery of videotapes of fund-raising coffees but said that at this point the tape evidence does not change her conclusion about the legality of President Clinton's fund-raising.

President Clinton's legal defense fund kept secret until after last November's election about $380,000 in suspicious donations it received in a plain manila envelope from Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, a longtime Clinton friend from Little Rock, Ark.

Federal prosecutors have notified defense lawyers that they intend to seek a criminal indictment against the Southern California Buddhist temple that hosted a 1996 political fund-raiser for Vice President Al Gore, accusing the religious center of violating campaign finance laws, it was learned Thursday.

In the six months leading up to last fall's election, the trustees of President Clinton's legal defense fund acted with the knowledge of the president and first lady to conceal the potentially embarrassing story of disciples of a Taiwan-based sect donating $639,000, according to interviews and newly available documents. The decision to later refund the money and keep the matter under wraps followed two meetings with White House officials.

In a downtown Little Rock, Ark., hotel room, Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie told a business partner from Asia that he was in need of "some spending money." The associate, Chinese developer Ng Lap Seng, promptly opened a suitcase filled with cash and handed Trie $20,000, according to an eyewitness account provided to a Senate committee tracking the flow of illegal foreign money into U.S. political campaigns.

A glimpse at the background of Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie reveals that the Taiwanese immigrant worked at his Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, Ark., before opening a small consulting office in Beijing in late 1992 when his friend of 13 years, Bill Clinton, was elected president. But his resume became much grander after a major make-over by the Clinton administration's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

From softly lit dining rooms at Washington's finest hotels to the Oval Office itself, videotapes made public Wednesday show President Clinton chatting with and at times even embracing some of the more notorious figures of the 1996 campaign. Whether his arm is draped around the shoulder of former star fund-raiser John Huang or whether Clinton is quietly engaging Indonesian billionaire James T.

As election day neared in 1996, a drumbeat of news accounts about suspicious foreign donations began to worry President Clinton's reelection team and Democratic Party leaders. In particular, White House officials feared additional embarrassing disclosures regarding Yogesh K. Gandhi, a California entrepreneur who had donated a whopping $325,000 to attend a fund-raising dinner at which he gave Clinton a bust of his relative, Mohandas K. Gandhi, in an unusual presentation with foreign visitors.

Officials of President Clinton's legal defense fund said Monday that they returned or rejected more than $600,000 in donations this year because of "significant concerns" about the sources of the money, delivered by a friend of the president from Little Rock, Ark. Some of the checks, turned in at different times by Charles Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, seemed to have identical handwriting, fund officials said Monday.