Campaign Fund Raising

By MICHAEL WEISSKOPF/WASHINGTON

For Democratic fund raisers, past may be prologue. It turns out that the very fellow positioned to oversee John Huang and his now infamous Asian money machine in 1996 came out of a Miami law firm that has had its own trouble with foreign fund raising. About two years before MARVIN ROSEN became the party's finance chairman, members of his law firm solicited $91,000 in campaign cash from a German real estate investor named Thomas Kramer. In a soon to be announced settlement with the Federal Election Commission, the firm--Greenberg, Traurig, Hoffman, Lipoff, Rosen & Quentel--has admitted that the money it raised for Florida and national races violated the ban on solicitation of foreigners, and agreed to pay a $77,000 fine. A spokesman for the firm refused to answer whether Rosen, a premier political fund raiser, hit up Kramer. The spokesman would say only that Rosen was not a "party" to the FEC investigation. In the agreement, the firm held that any violation was "inadvertent." But no one claimed ignorance of Kramer's citizenship status. It was while he was in Miami on a temporary visa that the German hired the firm to represent him on immigration matters.

--By Michael Weisskopf/Washington