DEMOCRATS WOOED RICH ASIANS, RECORDS SHOW.

Byline: Tim Weiner and David E. Sanger The New York Times

A White House official and a leading fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee helped devise a strategy to raise an unprecedented $7 million from Asian-Americans partly by offering rewards to the largest donors, including special access to the White House, the committee's records show.

The strategy is laid out in a ``National Asian Pacific American Campaign Plan,'' which was included among 3,000 pages of the committee's records made public over the past week.

Those records, drawn largely from the files of John Huang, the committee's chief fund-raiser in Asian-American communities, suggest that the party's goal of raising the $7 million helped create a high-pressure atmosphere that led to at least $1.2 million in improper donations.

The records, and interviews with donors, show that Huang told potential contributors that the time was ripe for them to win the political clout that had eluded Asian-Americans for a century. Political contributions were the path to power, he told them. Writing big checks would open doors for this generation and the next.

In many instances, Huang meant that quite literally. His files - including business cards, campaign memorandums and canceled checks from contributors - leave little doubt that the quid pro quo promised in exchange for large donations was in many cases a face-to-face meeting with the president.

Huang and Doris Matsui, a deputy assistant to President Clinton and the wife of Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Calif., helped create the fund-raising strategy, the records show. As part of that strategy, members of the Asian Pacific American Leadership Council - a title conferred on people who gave at least $10,000 and companies that gave at least $15,000 to the Democratic committee - were to receive an invitation to the White House.

The plan was to ``reward APALC members by inviting them to special White House or other events'' with the president and to ``solicit input,'' the records show. Responsibility for orchestrating that reward fell to the White House, the Clinton-Gore campaign and the Democratic committee.

Those meetings often featured discussions of Clinton's policies toward Asian nations, especially China, though no evidence has surfaced suggesting that the donors won changes in policy. Instead, the Democratic Party capitalized on decisions the president already had made - to extend China's preferential trading rights, to come to Taiwan's defense, to seek changes to the immigration and naturalization laws - to lure Asian-American donors.

The Justice Department is examining the legality of the donations solicited by Huang. They also are being scrutinized by a congressional panel that asked the Democratic National Committee to make the documents available last week.

Although Amy Weiss Tobe, a committee spokeswoman, declined to comment on the strategy plan, Lanny J. Davis, the White House special counsel, said, ``We will review this document and have a reaction to it, if appropriate, in the next several days.''

As the pressure to raise money intensified this spring to pay for television commercials and other campaign expenses, Huang, who joined the Democratic committee in December 1995 after a stint as a midlevel Commerce Department official, veered into forbidden territory.

He took donations improperly from foreign corporations and from people who were neither U.S. citizens nor foreign citizens living legally in the United States. And when Huang's fund-raising efforts went wrong, they usually went wrong with very large checks.

In some cases, those checks were drafted on the same day that a meeting was set up with Clinton. In one case, $250,000 bought a brief, and apparently somewhat comical, meeting at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel here between Clinton and a South Korean entrepreneur who had vague plans to build an electronics plant in Carson, Calif.

The entrepreneur spoke no English. Rather than labor through an uncomfortable conversation, he had his picture taken with the president and then left the dinner, eating instead with his entourage at a nearby Chinese restaurant.

In another case, Clinton's meeting with three business executives from the CP Group, a huge Thai conglomerate with interests in China and elsewhere in Asia, came within days of $185,000 in contributions from a Thai-American businesswoman, Pauline Kanchanalak.

The Democratic committee later returned those donations, saying the money might not have come directly from Kanchanalak, as required by campaign law. The committee has offered a vague explanation, saying the money may have been given by a relative of hers.

And there are hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks from Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata, an Indonesian couple who appear on seating charts at a private dinner with Vice President Al Gore along with Huang and Charlie Yah Lin Trie, an Arkansas restaurateur and self-styled Asian trade adviser who personally delivered $639,000 in improper contributions to Clinton's legal defense fund earlier this year. Those contributions also have been returned.

In March, Trie arranged for one of China's top weapons dealers to attend a private briefing with Clinton. Clinton now says he did not know who the Chinese official was, and says his attendance at the small briefing was ``inappropriate.''

In total, at least $1.2 million of the $3.4 million Huang raised came from questionable sources and has been returned. That money has become the greatest sum of campaign cash to come under federal investigation since President Nixon's 1972 re-election drive.

The Asian-American fund-raising effort was conceived by the Democratic committee and coordinated with the White House and the Clinton-Gore campaign, the records show. It was driven by a single stark statistic: Clinton received only 31 percent of the Asian-American vote in 1992 while President Bush won 55 percent. Campaign money had flowed accordingly.

To reverse that situation, Huang joined the Democratic committee in December 1995 and served on the committee's Asian Pacific American Working Group.

The group, formed in February, included Matsui, the highest-ranking Asian-American in the White House; Maria Haley, director of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, who played a role in helping Huang obtain his job as a Commerce Department official in 1994; Ginger Lew, general counsel to the Commerce Department; and several staff members of the Democratic National Committee.