MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE

By MICHAEL DUFFY

Democratic fund raiser John Huang has been out of sight in Washington, but he was practically stalking the President last week in Australia, where Clinton played golf with Greg Norman, ogled the scalloped opera house in Sydney and stomped through a rain forest near the Great Barrier Reef. No matter where Clinton went to get away, he found himself deflecting questions about Huang and his former boss, Indonesian banker James T. Riady. "Mark Twain said every dog should have a few fleas," the President quipped; "keeps them from worrying so much about being a dog."

But if Huang & Co. hounded him Down Under, Clinton and his aides were partly to blame. Back home, White House officials issued clarifications that came out in dribs and drabs. There were two patterns in the disclosures. First, the contacts between Clinton, Huang and Riady were more numerous and substantive than previously acknowledged. Second, whatever the White House said about the flap before the election may no longer be operative.

The biggest reversal came on the eve of the President's departure, when Clinton admitted the true nature of his talks with Riady, whose employees, relatives, clients and business partners have a way of turning up at Democratic Party fund raisers. The Administration line was that a September meeting last year was purely social. Nine days after the election, the President set the record straight and acknowledged that he had indeed discussed U.S. policy toward China with Riady that day.

The nature of Huang's job at the Commerce Department, where he was employed before becoming a Democratic fund raiser, became a little clearer as well. Huang had maintained that he scrupulously avoided doing any work on matters that involved his former employer, Riady's Lippo Group, while at the department. Last week logs showed that Huang telephoned the office of a Riady subsidiary, the Lippo Bank in Los Angeles, 70 times during his 18-month tenure at Commerce. The Los Angeles Times has reported that a number of contributors gave donations to the Democratic Party sometimes within days of talking to Huang at Commerce.

On Friday the Democratic Party announced that it would return $450,000 it had received in 1995 from Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata, two Indonesians with ties to the Riady empire who lived briefly in Northern Virginia. Only 10 days before, Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler had said the donation was legal and had been "thoroughly reviewed." But on Friday the D.N.C. said that the Wiriadinatas had "not filed their U.S. income tax return for 1995" and that the committee could not take the money "in these circumstances." The D.N.C. said it would return the money--just as soon as it found a working address for the couple. That will bring the total sent back to donors by the party since late September to more than $1.5 million, more than half of which had been raised by Huang. On Saturday a top Justice Department official said the fbi may soon start to interview Huang's network of donors.

Clinton didn't comment specifically on the new developments while on vacation, but he did try self-pity as a general defense. He even likened himself to Richard Jewell, who was the chief target in the Olympic-bombing investigation. "One of the things I would urge you to do, remembering what happened to Mr. Jewell in Atlanta, remembering what has happened to so many of the accusations that over the past four years have been made against me that turned out to be totally baseless."

It's true that Richard Jewell is no longer a suspect. But then, he never changed his story.

--By Michael Duffy. Reported by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, J.F.O. McAllister and Viveca Novak/Washington

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM, J.F.O. MCALLISTER AND VIVECA NOVAK/WASHINGTON