Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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1-2-3, Look at Wen Ho Lee

Wednesday September 13, 2000

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson is not Vice Presidential nominee Bill Richardson largely due to the alleged activities of Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Wen Ho Lee is accused of stealing information stored on secure computers which may have allowed our friends in what used to be called Communist China to skip over decades of pesky inventing, testing, perfecting, and testing again by simply reading the materials Wen Ho Lee may have sent to them.

A federal grand jury indicted Lee on 59 counts of espionage and related activities.

The feds, having botched this case from day one, have agreed to a plea bargain which allows Lee to cop to one of the 59 counts - illegally downloading classified data into an unsecured computer - and dropping the other 58 charges. His sentence would be nine months which, as it happens, is the amount of time which has elapsed since Lee's arrest and now.

He walks.

There are seven computer tapes which are missing. No one seems to know if they are in the bottom of a canyon or racked up on a computer bank in Beijing.

Monday, Lee was supposed to be in court enter to his plea and be released. Something went awry and he was sent back to the slam until today.

Someone should get Janet Reno, Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, or Al Gore on the record as to what, if any, contact senior officials may have had with the prosecutors in Albuquerque over the past 48-or-so hours and what might have been discussed.

As regular Mullsters know, I am not normally given to conspiracy theories, but there is something about this Wen Ho Lee thing which smells like New York City in the second week of a mid-summer garbage strike.

Is it possible the Justice Department has allowed this case to sort of slip through their fingers at the request of the Chinese? The request might have taken the form of a minor suggestion that certain memos and phone records might find their way into the public record between now and the election regarding the requests for and transfers of funds into the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1996.

The Energy Department and the Justice Department appear to have singled Lee out because he is Chinese - he was born in Taiwan and is a naturalized US citizen, a level of racial profiling which makes the New Jersey State Police look like organizers for the NAACP.

Was it a bad investigation to start with? Was it an effort for the Clinton/Gore administration to show it was "tough on the China question?" Was it an effort (obviously gone very, very wrong) by Richardson to use the Lee case to make his own case for the VP slot stronger?

Hello? Oliver Stone? I believe I have an idea for a movie.

Here's a unique use of Napster: How would you go about finding who sang the song, "Mr. Lee" so you could write a really catchy title to your column? Go to Napster and hope someone had it in their collection. Someone did. It was sung by the Bobbetts.

To hear this song (and to see the Mullings Catchy Caption of the Day) go here.

The "RATS" ad has apparently finished its normal rotation and will be no more. Of all the weird accusations the Gore campaign has launched at George W. this has to be the topper. Another section of the ad, which has not made headlines, had the letters "WIT" appear on the screen as part of the word "with."

No one - I guarantee you - no one in the Bush campaign is likely to have spent a dime on a subliminal message that Al Gore is a witty guy.

What people don't know is this: If you play the ad backwards it says, "Paul is dead."

Pat Buchanan won a big round as the Federal Election Commission decided he, not John Hagelin, should get $12.6 million in federal funds. Buchanan, in a statement, said he was pleased to be receiving the 28,582,600 Deutsche Marks to get his message to the voters.

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Copyright © 2000 Richard A. Galen

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