Between spring 1994 and late summer 1996, more than $600,000 poured into Democratic war chests within weeks of at least 68 coffee klatches held at the White House. Indeed, the coffee drinkers gave $6.5 million. President Clinton's aides deny any direct correlation and insist that it's all just `coincidence.'

Like the smiling Juan Valdez character, President Bill Clinton has been very successful in the coffee business. Instead of keeping the records of his coffee fund-raisers in the saddlebags of the Democratic donkey, however, Clinton has used the White House Office Data Base, or WHODB, a sophisticated computer system also known as Big Brother, which cost taxpayers well over $1.7 million. The White House has denied any wrongdoing, but congressional sources and bipartisan officials of prior administrations allege that uses of the Executive Mansion computer have broken ethical and legal rules that prohibit commingling of government and political purposes.

How much intermingling has there been between operations at the White House and the Democratic National Committee, or DNC? The answer is suggested by the steam rising from a series of coffee klatches held at the Executive Mansion in 1994, 1995 and 1996. Based on newly obtained documents and interviews with government and private-sector sources, Insight has learned that, contrary to statements by senior White House aides and DNC officials, an operation was established at the highest levels of government to generate large sums of cash for Democratic coffers -- going so far as to sell time with the president. This despite Clinton's own clear statement about the issue during public remarks on Aug. 4, 1995, when he said: "It is wrong to raise money on the promise of guaranteed specific kinds of access."

The evidence now suggests that precisely is what happened, as officials at the White House and at the DNC worked behind the scenes to rake in big bucks from the private sector by linking donations to the highest imaginable access -- time with the president himself -- and overnight stays at the White House in the Lincoln Bedroom.

In fact, according to a list of people who attended at least 68 coffee klatches at the White House between 1994 and 1996, these individuals were, indeed, big-time donors to Democrats -- with combined contributions at the federal level topping $6.5 million. Moreover, within a month of each of the coffee klatches, according to Federal Election Commission records, the take from these sources was more than $600,000 to beneficiaries including the Clinton/Gore reelection committee and the Clinton legal-defense fund.

Members of Congress and investigators from both political parties are alarmed about the ethnical and legal implications. As one of many sources told Insight, "this raises substantial questions about the buying of an American president." According to another source familiar with congressional and press scrutiny of the erupting fund-raising scandals involving influential Asians such as John Huang, the terminated DNC financier and former Commerce Department official, one of the tools investigators successfully may use to explore the tangled roots of the Clinton money tree is the Big Brother computer. As regular readers of Insight know, this computer system variously has been described by White House aides as a simple Rolodex, a Christmas-card mailing list and a social organizer involving only "official government functions." Now comes yet more information confirming that WHODB was and is being used on a much larger scale. Besides keeping track of financial supporters, the Big Brother computer system also has been used to orchestrate events at the White House, such as those "private" coffees with the president.

For example, of the roughly 980 individuals listed as participants at these events, attended by many of the same people, nearly half were or are top-tier officials in the finance and political divisions of the DNC and the White House. These include Donald Fowler, former head of the DNC, Harold Ickes, deputy chief of staff at the White House; Thomas "Mack" McLarty, former chief of staff at the White House; Douglas Sosnik, a top White House political aide; Eric Eve, another top White House political aide; and Erskine Bowles, then deputy White House chief of staff and now chief of staff.

Also in attendance at the coffees -- besides the president -- were Doris Matsui, a senior aide at the White House and the wife of Democratic Rep. Robert Matsui of California, and a key contact for the DNC's fund-raising efforts in the Asian-American community, Terrance McAuliffe, a former DNC finance vice chairman and fund-raising guru for the Clinton/Gore reelection committee; Marsha Scott, since 1994 a deputy assistant to the president; Marsha Hale, a White House aide in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs; Alexis Herman, White House aide in charge of public liaison; Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut; Melanne Verveer, the deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton; and Huang, a former fund-raiser for the DNC and a sub-Cabinet officer at the Commerce Department.

Of the remaining half, roughly 400 patrons, a few had longstanding ties to the Democratic Party and/or the president. The majority, however, were relative unknowns except for having recently given huge contributions to the DNC as part of its outreach efforts to "empower" the Asian community. These included Pauline Kanchanalak, a Thai businesswoman who attended a White House coffee on June 18, 1996, and on June 19 donated $68,000 to the DNC. In total, Kanchanalak gave $253,500 to the Democratic Party though most of that since has been returned because of suspicion that the funds were improperly and/or illegally collected on behalf of the DNC.

Another in attendance was Charles Yah Lin Trie, who sipped coffee at the White House on Feb. 6, 1996, a meeting to which he brought Wang Ju, chief of military arms sales for the People's Republic of China. After this coffee, and within weeks of several other such meetings at the White House in 1996, Trie delivered about $460,000 to the president's legal-defense fund. He also secured a high-level position on an official U.S.-Asian advisory board created by Clinton to increase business ties with the Far East. (In total, Trie visited the White House 37 times, including at least one of the coffees tracked by the WHODB.)

Moreover, according to the documents and sources, some of those in attendance at the Clinton coffees also had been on VIP trade trips overseas sponsored by the Commerce Department. These and invitations for coffee with the president were highlighted by the DNC at one time as a benefit for giving $100,000 to the party. The alleged selling of the Commerce trips now is the subject of a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group that is seeking enforcement of its Freedom of Information Act requests for details about the trips. Larry Klayman, head of Judicial Watch, believes some of these trips, sponsored by the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, were illegal because at least some of the guests allegedly were invited based on the amount of money they had given or were willing to give to such political endeavors as the presidential legal-defense fund.

As with Vice President Albert Gore's recent disclosure that, in fact, he was aware that a now-infamous affair at a Buddhist Temple in California was a fund-raising event and not a community-outreach conference as claimed during the election, stories are changing. Especially given to change have been DNC and White House accounts about events that involved Huang and Asians linked to the so-called Indogate scandal, also known gate scandal, also known as Lippogate.

The latter has emerged as a result of the role of Huang and his former employer, Lippo Bank USA, in raising questionable donations for Democrats. The Lippo Bank is part of a global conglomerate known as Lippo Ltd., which is run by Mochtar Riady and his son, James, a long-time acquaintance of Clinton. This conglomerate now is under congressional and Justice Department scrutiny as part of the larger scandal involving Democratic fund-raising that has dominated the news since the president won reelection.

As readers of Insight have learned from previous stories about WHODB, the computer contains data on more than 200,000 individuals, including but not limited to their names, gender, honors, degrees, companies and whether they are or have been political and financial supporters of the president. White House officials repeatedly have denied any wrongdoing in creating the computer system at the behest of the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. At the same time, uses of the WHODB have been revised numerous times since last summer, when existence of the computer was first revealed in these pages. Moreover, details of what is in the computer system have substantially changed since last year; it now is known, for instance, that the WHODB contains not just people in contact with the president, but also data on dubious events such as the White House coffees that previously were not publicly known.

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that while there is "no protocol governing" the coffees, presidential aides could attend only if their duties called for them to be present. And this official told Insight the White House was "reimbursed" by whatever political group" held the events. If so this raises substantial legal and ethical questions about the presence of White House staff at any of the "reimbursed" coffees because it means they were not governmental in nature.

When asked to comment about the coffees, Amy Weiss Tobe, spokeswoman for the DNC, did not address the apparent conundrum of "political" events supported by the presence of government-paid White House staff. However, she said the coffees were held whenever "the president was not traveling" and were designed for the purpose of gathering people from around the country to talk about the political topics of the day" or for "personal conversations" with the president.

Asked if such events could be considered fund raisers, Tobe said "No." She quipped that people seem to be surprised that the purpose of the (Democratic National] Committee is to raise money," but repeated that none of the coffees were for that purpose. Apparently the hundreds of juxtapositions of the klatches and the large donations were as coincidental as the leap of Minerva from the brow of Zeus.

When asked last Nov. 8 about such fund-raising events at the White House, Clinton said, "You know, a lot of our fund-raisers are open. And most of the smaller events we have are just -- are basically round-robin discussions from people who very often come from very different perspectives on issues."

Congressional and Justice Department investigators now are searching determine the truth.