White House to release Mochtar Riady's letter

White House to release Mochtar Riady's letter

WASHINGTON (Reuter): President Bill Clinton said on Monday the White House will release a 1993 letter to him from Indonesian businessman Mochtar Riady and suggested there was nothing wrong in Riady having given him policy advice.

Riady is the founder of the Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate that has been linked to a series of questionable contributions to Clinton's re-election campaign.

The Wall Street Journal said on Monday that the letter, dated March 9, 1993, urged Clinton to resume normal relations with Vietnam and remain engaged with China despite its human rights record.

"It's a letter like tens of thousands of other letters I get ... suggesting what our policy ought to be in various areas," Clinton told reporters after a White House ceremony honoring astronaut Shannon Lucid.

"We will make that letter available to Congress, after which I'm sure it will be made available to you. But you will see it's a straightforward policy letter, the kind of thing that I think people ought to feel free to write the president about," he said.

"There is not any public record that suggests that any financial contributor had a disproportionate influence on policy," White House spokesman Mike McCurry added.

In the final weeks of the presidential campaign against Republican Bob Dole, Clinton's campaign became embroiled in a controversy over several questionable contributions, among them those linked to the Lippo Group.

The Democratic National Committee gave back US$450,000 from an Indonesian couple, Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata, who have ties to Lippo, calling the contribution "inappropriate."

On Friday, the Justice Department decided not to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the matter, increasing the chances that the Republican-controlled Congress will hold its own hearings on the contributions.

McCurry told reporters at his daily briefing the White House was gathering relevant documents and intended to provide these to Congress, and to the public, in due course.

Separately, Representative Gerald Solomon, the New York Republican who chairs the House Rules Committee, on Monday wrote to Clinton demanding that he be sent Riady's letter immediately.

"Failure to do so could only be construed ... as a continuation of the pattern of stonewalling begun before the recent elections," Solomon wrote.