Delayed DNC Papers Irk Thompson

The Democratic National Committee has angered the chairman of the Senate committee probing campaign finance abuses by belatedly handing over thousands of documents sought by the congressional investigators--including a list of prospective fund-raising phone calls prepared for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton last year.

A spokeswoman for the first lady said she “doesn’t have any recollection of being asked to, or having made, any fund-raising calls,” and DNC officials said the papers do not indicate whether the dozen calls set up for her were ever made.

The production of the boxes of documents on Monday--which came as the Senate investigating committee is taking a break following four weeks of testimony--prompted Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), the panel’s chairman, to suggest that the DNC may have intentionally hidden the records to sidetrack his probe.

“The committee and the chairman are not terribly happy with what appears to be . . . an intentional effort to deny relevant documents . . . and delay the committee in its work,” a committee source said.

The records, which have not been released to the public, come from the files of former DNC Finance Chairman Richard Sullivan, who testified in early July as the opening witness of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearings.

Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, the DNC chairman, said Thursday that the documents were just recently discovered in a filing cabinet in Sullivan’s old DNC office by his successor, Paul DiNino. “This was an honest oversight,” Romer said. “There’s absolutely no reason anyone in that office had any interest in holding this information back.”

DiNino said in an interview that he opened the drawers of the filing cabinet at some point after he first arrived at his DNC office on Feb. 20 and, in a cursory review, spotted brochures and other seemingly innocuous material. “I opened the top drawer and it appeared to me to be very common items such as brochures,” he said. “I opened another drawer that had legal pads with doodles on them.”

DiNino said that when DNC officials recently urged staffers to search the premises again for papers sought under a Senate subpoena, he inspected the filing cabinet again on July 30 and discovered four boxes of relevant records.

Initially, the records were sent by a DNC staffer to Sullivan’s attorney. Romer said this “was an improper thing to do.” When DNC officials discovered this, they had the lawyer return the files.

Romer, who recently pledged to redouble DNC efforts to comply with the requests for records, said he informed Thompson about the newly discovered documents on Aug. 1, the day he learned about them. He told the chairman that DNC staffers would take the weekend to review them and turn them over to the committee on Monday, which they did.

Among the thousands of pages were a dozen “call sheets” prepared by DNC fund-raisers for the first lady. The names of the donors were not released Thursday.

The documents also contained potentially important handwritten notes prepared by Sullivan, who oversaw party fund-raising efforts that raised record sums--including $3.4 million in questionable contributions that the DNC has since returned. Some of that money originated overseas, a violation of U.S. election laws.

The documents also included files on Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chien Chuen Chung, a prime figure in the campaign finance controversy, and Roger Tamraz, an oil financier who is the focus of allegations that he offered political donations to win White House support for an overseas oil pipeline.

Governmental Affairs Committee spokesman Paul Clark said Thompson is “clearly disturbed” at what appears to be “a pattern of delay and obfuscation” in the release of documents by the White House and the DNC. Late last month, Thompson railed against the White House and issued a wide-ranging zsubpoena because he said officials there were not promptly producing records.

“The committee has an overriding interest to know just why it is the DNC has been so derelict in response to a valid congressional subpoena,” Clark said.

Thompson himself was traveling in Tennessee on Thursday and could not be reached for comment. In an interview with the Washington Post, he called the late production of the papers a serious matter.

“The people who were handling this are going to be held accountable,” Thompson said, adding that he is considering taking sworn statements from “everyone at the DNC from the janitors on up. . . . “

Former and current Democratic officials offered conflicting accounts regarding the handling of Sullivan’s files.

Robert F. Bauer, Sullivan’s attorney, said his client told a DNC attorney about the file cabinet when he left in February. Moreover, he said Sullivan informed the DNC that he was unable to get access to all his files as he prepared for his Senate testimony because the DNC had not provided all of his documents to its outside law firm, which in turn sent the records to the Senate.

Romer, however, said DNC attorney Joe Birkenstock was unaware of the newly discovered Sullivan files until recent weeks. “Everyone was responsible for going through their own files and then delivering them to Birkenstock,” Romer said, attributing the oversight to “some glitch in communication.”

Times staff writer Mark Gladstone contributed to this story.