DNC Hosted Bank Officers, Top Regulator

WASHINGTON — One of the White House coffee klatches last May for potentially large contributors to the Democratic Party was attended not only by Democratic National Committee officials and more than a dozen banking executives but also by a top federal banking regulator, newly released White House documents revealed Friday.

One of the regulators, Comptroller of the Currency Eugene A. Ludwig, said through a spokeswoman that he would not have participated in the White House meeting between President Clinton and more than a dozen chief executives from the nation’s largest financial companies if he had known that the DNC had arranged the session for political supporters.

Ludwig, whose term as comptroller expires next year, has made extraordinary efforts to “stay a great distance from any kind of involvement with anything that could at all be construed as political,” said a Treasury Department source. “There is nothing technically illegal about it but it does not give a good appearance.”

Meanwhile, internal documents released Friday by the White House showed that Asian Americans, alone among ethnic groups whose support was sought by the administration during Clinton’s reelection campaign last year, were given a campaign contribution target by Democratic political operatives.

Clinton and Democratic Party officials have complained that the news media’s concentration on questionable fund-raising practices in the Asian American community verged on racism. The documents suggest, however, that only this group was asked by the Democrats to contribute a total of $7 million.

The White House coffee klatches represented one technique by which White House and Democratic officials sought to round up both political support and campaign contributions.

The DNC-sponsored coffee meetings, usually lasting up to an hour in the White House Map Room, have been a source of continuing controversy since it was revealed last month that participants included donors who subsequently gave six-figure donations. Another of the invited guests was a Chinese arms dealer.

Rep. Gerald B. Solomon (R-N.Y.) told the Associated Press that inviting Ludwig in his role as a banking regulator to meet with banking executives at a political event in the White House was “highly unethical.”

White House spokesman Lanny Davis, bristling at any suggestion that the White House was put up for sale, defended the informal meetings. “There’s nothing unusual in presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton inviting people to the White House, some of which happen to be financial contributors,” Davis said.

Ludwig, whose office regulates nationally chartered banks, attended a May 13 coffee klatch. The guest list made public Friday by the White House also showed 17 top banking executives and two high-ranking Democratic officials, national chairman Donald L. Fowler and finance chairman Marvin S. Rosen.

“He didn’t know when he went that anyone from the DNC had been invited,” said Lee Cross, a spokeswoman for Ludwig. “He said if he had known the DNC had also been invited, he would not have attended the meeting.”

When Treasury officials receive a party invitation, the event is screened by department attorneys to ensure that all laws separating government and political activity are strictly observed. But in this case, the invitation came from the White House office of public liaison and Ludwig was unaware it was a Democratic event, a Treasury official said.

“We’re sorry that Mr. Ludwig feels this way, but we believe it was appropriate for DNC officials to be at the event because we arranged it,” said party spokeswoman Amy Weiss Tobe. “It is appropriate for supporters to meet with the president, to hear the party and his message and to exchange views.”

The institutions represented by eight of the banking executives who attended the May 13 coffee klatch donated a total of $332,654 to the Democratic Party, according to an analysis of federal election records by the Campaign Study Group. BankAmerica Corp. of San Francisco wrote a $100,000 check the month after its then-chairman, Richard M. Rosenberg, went to the White House.

Rosenberg, who retired last May, said through a BankAmerica spokesman that the meeting “dealt entirely with banking and economic issues.” He declined to elaborate.

Administration officials attending, besides Ludwig, were Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance John D. Hawke Jr. and White House official Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty.

Toby said that the guest list was drawn up by Frank N. Newman, a former Treasury undersecretary in the Clinton administration and currently an executive with Bankers Trust Co. of New York. The firm gave the Democrats $75,000 on July 5, records show.

Internal documents released by the White House on Friday show that top presidential aides mapped a reelection strategy early last year to attract political support from blacks, Latinos, Jews, Asian Americans and other ethnic groups.

But they planned an aggressive campaign to raise money among only Asian Americans.

The national “outreach” plans, ordered by then-Clinton top aide Harold M. Ickes, specifically set an ambitious fund-raising target of $7 million for Asian American constituents. No goals were set for other ethnic groups.

Clinton and other Democratic Party leaders have complained about “disparaging” references to Asian Americans and strongly suggested that criticism of the Democrats’ illegal fund-raising from Asian sources bordered on racism.

The Boston Globe reported last Sunday that the White House and the Democratic National Committee, in setting a strategy for dealing with questions about the foreign fund-raising affair, raised the bigotry issue as a way of diverting attention from the illegal contributions.

But the newly released documents suggest it was the Democrats who first singled out Asian Americans by making them uniquely the target of a fund-raising goal. Former DNC Vice Chairman John Huang, a Clinton friend who lives in Glendale, specialized in soliciting money from the Asian American community for the Democrats’ fund-raising bonanza.

Times staff writer James F. Peltz in Los Angeles contributed to this story.