Library Funding Irks Legislator: ‘I Tell You, It Stinks,’ He Says
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A Tennessee congressman said yesterday that he may reintroduce legislation to require disclosure of large donations to presidential libraries, following a report in The New York Sun that President Clinton’s new archive and museum in Arkansas was built in part with millions of dollars in gifts from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf countries.
“I tell you, it stinks,” Rep. John Duncan Jr. said in a telephone interview from his home in Knoxville. “It just doesn’t pass the smell test, what’s going on with these libraries.”
Mr. Duncan, a Republican who sits on the House Committee on Government Reform, first proposed a law mandating disclosure of gifts to presidential libraries in 1999. The measure received little attention until a scandal erupted in 2001 about pardons granted by Mr. Clinton as he left office, including one to a fugitive financier, Marc Rich. It was reported that Mr. Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, gave $450,000 to Mr. Clinton’s library fund while he was considering the pardon.
In May 2001, the House committee voted in favor of a bill that would have required that any donation of more than $200 made toward construction of a presidential library be publicly reported. After the library opened and was turned over to the National Archives, as is customary, the reporting threshold would have risen to $5,000.
However, the legislation never made it to a vote on the House floor or in the Senate. Mr. Clinton’s foundation voluntarily disclosed the names of most donors when the library opened last week. However, it has declined to identify all the donors and has not released their hometowns, occupations, or the amounts of their donations. The Sun used publicly available data about some gifts to the library to estimate that each donor identified by the foundation as a “trustee” gave $1 million or more.
Mr. Duncan said he still considers the lack of any regulation of donations to presidential libraries a serious gap in campaign finance controls.
“The potential for abuse there is so obvious that it’s just amazing,” the congressman said. “It’s just a real convenient way for those who want to get around campaign finance laws to do so to curry favor with people in high places.”
Mr. Duncan also said he suspects that some of the donors may be trying to win influence with Senator Clinton. “There’s already a lot of talk about Mrs. Clinton running for president,” the congressman said.
While foreign governments and foreign nationals are prohibited from giving to federal campaigns, they are free to give in any amount to a presidential library.
The Embassy of Kuwait confirmed yesterday that it gave $1 million to Mr. Clinton’s foundation in June. “President Clinton did a lot for world peace, in the Balkans. He did a lot of things in terms of Kuwait and the rest of the world,” a spokeswoman for the embassy, Fatima Al Khalifa, said. She noted that the library gave a similar amount to President George H.W. Bush’s library in Texas.
A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy said it was still trying to gather information about the donation that the Clinton library said it received from the Saudi royal family. The library also received gifts estimated at $1 million or more each from three Saudi businessmen.
Mr. Duncan said the Saudis are clearly using their largesse as part of an effort to gain influence in America. “The Saudis use this as just another key way to play our system. We have a lot of problems out of the Saudis,” he said. “They’ve really taken advantage of us in a lot of ways.”
The gifts to the library are not the first instance of Saudi largesse pointed in Mr. Clinton’s direction. Soon after his election in 1992, the Saudis endowed a $21 million research center at the University of Arkansas. The King Fahd Center for Middle East & Islamic Studies in Fayetteville employs more than a dozen faculty members specializing in Arabic language, history, and politics.
Since leaving the White House, Mr. Clinton has twice spoken at economic conferences in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. For the last such meeting in January, Mr. Clinton was invited to bring along 40 friends. Crown Prince Abdullah sent a plane to New Jersey to pick up the group, which included actors Chevy Chase and John Cusack, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and a former health care adviser to the Clintons’ who now works for the president’s foundation, Ira Magaziner.
“The Saudis provided the jet and they took care of all the expenses,” said one of the guests, Sylvia Steiner of West Orange, N.J. Mrs. Steiner, whose husband, David, is a real estate developer and loyal donor to Mr. Clinton’s efforts, insisted that at the conference the former president did not pander to the Saudis.
“It wasn’t like he was sucking up to them,” she said. “They weren’t too happy about what he said.”
Mrs. Steiner said Mr. Clinton told the Saudis that if the rich were willing to part with just a small fraction of their wealth, many of the kingdom’s problems could be solved. The former president also called on the Saudis to let women drive. “The women applauded him wildly and the men sat on their hands,” Mrs. Steiner said.
The Clinton crowd flew on to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and to Germany, still at Saudi expense.
Some Saudi-watchers have noted that less than three months after that trip, Mr. Clinton met with the September 11 commission, which said it was highly impressed by the former president’s assessment of the Saudi response to terrorism.” President Clinton offered us a perceptive analysis of Saudi Arabia, contending that fundamentally friendly rulers have been constrained by their desire to preserve the status quo,” the board wrote. “There are signs that Saudi Arabia’s royal family is trying to build a consensus for political reform.”
At a panel discussion over the summer, commission member Jamie Gorelick made clear that at least one of the key anecdotes Mr. Clinton related came from one of his visits with the Saudis. “We were struck – all 10 of us on the commission – by President Clinton’s remarks to us about Saudi Arabia,” Ms. Gorelick said. She went on to repeat a story Mr. Clinton offered about asking Crown Prince Abdullah in Davos whether he could imagine the status quo continuing in Saudi Arabia for another decade.
While the Saudis appear to be making an aggressive effort to court Mr. Clinton and perhaps Mrs. Clinton as well, the long-standing ties that President Bush’s family has to the kingdom cannot be disputed. Two of the major donors to the Clinton library, who are prominent business figures in Saudi Arabia, also have financial links to Mr. Bush’s family.
According to Texas Monthly magazine, Nasser Al Rashid, a wealthy Saudi construction magnate who went to school in Texas, and Hamza Al Kholi, an Egyptian with vast business interests in Saudi Arabia, were both investors in a company run by one of the president’s brothers, Neil.
A charity run by Barbara Bush has also been the recipient of Saudi munificence, as has a scholarship fund at Andover that bears the name of President George H.W. Bush.
The congressman who has pushed for greater disclosure of library gifts, Mr. Duncan, said it is possible that the measure lost momentum when it became clear that President Bush might be the first president to really be affected by it.
“There may be some truth in that. I don’t know,” Mr. Duncan said.
He insisted that his push for the legislation has never been motivated by partisanship. “I didn’t do this to get back at President Clinton in any way. He never did anything to me,” the congressman said.