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.