Hsia’s letter was not part of the record when a Senate committee investigated Gore’s dealings with Hsia and the Buddhist temple. The reason, says a Gore staffer, is that it was misfiled with documents pertaining to a presidential panel, chaired by Gore, on aviation security. Only when Victoria Cummock, a panel member whose husband died in the Pan Am 103 explosion over Lockerbie, sued for access to the aviation commission’s full records did Hsia’s letter reappear, along with other DNC-related papers.
A Gore aide dismisses any suggestion that the vice president’s office tried to cover up its help for Hsia, who goes on trial next month for allegedly funneling illegal contributions to the DNC. (She denies the charges.) “As with so many of these cases, nothing happened,” the aide says. INS official David Rosenberg says this was the only time he’d received such a request from Gore’s office, but attests that “it went nowhere.”
Perhaps for good reason: Republicans had already attacked the White House for using citizenship programs as political tools. And, two weeks after INS received Hsia’s letter, the stories about Gore’s temple fund-raiser broke. As for the misfiling, Kamarck calls it “a mistake.” But Republicans are likely to pounce. Says a GOP investigator, “This looks like another example of Clinton-Gore documents disappearing into the ether.”
