Today we will be continuing our series on the dark and sordid history of the Clinton administration for the young and perpetually uninformed. The man in the far left side of this photograph is named Johnny Chung. Mr. Chung was born in Taiwan and was the owner of an automated faxing business in California. In 1996, he would find himself in the middle of one of the most serious and damaging scandals in the history of the United States.
Johnny Chung made at least 49 visits to the White House throughout the early years of the Clinton administration. During one of these visits, he handed a 50,000 dollar check to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Chief of Staff, Margaret Williams. Williams accepted this check and then handed it over to the Democratic National Committee even though federal law bars government employees from accepting campaign donations while on government property. For the two years leading up to the 1996 election, Johnny Chung would end up providing twelve separate donations to the DNC totaling 366,000 dollars.
Johnny Chung’s suspicious contribution behavior would ultimately trigger a federal investigation. Mr. Chung was charged with funneling illegal campaign contributions to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign by asking his friends and the employees of his office technology firm to make contributions for which they were later reimbursed. Johnny Chung agreed to cooperate with federal investigators as part of his plea agreement. He soon admitted that a Chinese Army Lieutenant Colonel named Liu Chaoying (who was an executive with a state-owned aerospace company) provided him with 300,000 dollars to donate to the Clinton campaign.
This is where the story becomes extremely sticky and disturbing. Immediately after Chung made these illegal campaign contributions to the Clinton campaign, President Clinton agreed to voluntarily transfer some of our top secret missile technology over to China for no obvious reason. This is the technology that would help companies like Liu Chaoying’s aerospace company to improve the accuracy of its long-range ballistic missile technology. This would drastically improve the effectiveness of the weapons which could be used at any time against the United States.
Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown was intimately involved with the business dealings going on between the United States and China during this time. He would allegedly tell his business partner Nolanda Hill that Hillary Clinton had conceived of a scheme to sell trade mission plane seats to businessmen who gave at least 50,000 dollars to the DNC. Ron Brown would soon be placed under tremendous pressure to testify against the Clintons about the illegal fundraising operation that had been recently discovered. Ron Brown would die in an apparent accidental plane crash on April 3rd, 1996 before he would ever get the opportunity to testify in court. Many people have deep skepticism regarding the details surrounding Secretary Brown’s death which still exists to this very day.
Johnny Chung would eventually be convicted of bank fraud, tax evasion, and two counts of conspiracy to violate election law. The DNC would go on to raise tens of millions of dollars which would lead to the successful reelection of President Bill Clinton. The black box from Ron Brown’s plane crash into a Croatian hillside would never be recovered.
