Democrats on the Governmental Affairs Committee, and apparently the attorney general, presumably regard these and other apparent offenses as merely random acts of excessive exuberance. Committee Democrats are expected to stress that fund-raising is messy and that everyone uses "soft money." They also likely will discover instances in which Republican fund-raisers have stepped over the line. But the hearings seem almost certain to develop a mass of evidence suggesting that the president knew a lot about what his agents were doing, and that he and his confidants must have understood that they were taking money from illegal sources.

Investigators probing a White House conspiracy could even zero in on a suspected date of launch: Sept. 13, 1995. On that day, the president and senior aide Bruce Lindsey met with Mr. Huang, Arkansas wheeler-dealer Joseph Giroir and James Riady, scion of Indonesia's Lippo Group.

White House accounts of the September 1995 meeting have been marked by stonewalls and half-truths since the final days of the 1996 presidential campaign, when New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Stephen Labaton revealed several White House meetings with James Riady. Before the election, the White House characterized the Riady meetings as "social" visits. After the election, the White House disclosed that the dispatch of Mr. Huang from Commerce to the DNC had been discussed at the September 1995 meeting; in the White House version of events, Mr. Huang had "volunteered" for the fund-raising post.

Yet a look at the players gathered in the White House that September day in 1995 continues to call into question the administration's version of events. The self-effacing Mr. Huang was the least important person in the room and seems the least likely to "volunteer" for anything. He had left the employ of Lippo Group in 1994 with a $700,000 bonus to join the Commerce Department with a top-secret clearance.

Mr. Riady, by contrast, was the former employer who provided the bonus, and presumably controlled other financial spigots. One week after Mr. Riady and his associates paid five visits to the White House in June 1994, for example, Lippo made a $100,000 payment to former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell, then under pressure to cooperate with the Whitewater probe. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr is investigating that payment as possible "hush money." Mr. Riady's association with Mr. Clinton reaches back to the early 1980s, when his family owned an interest in Little Rock's Worthen Bank. At the same time he developed a relationship with Mr. Giroir, now involved in Lippo-related business ventures in Indonesia and China. Mr. Riady has now returned to Indonesia.

After the September meeting with the president, Mr. Huang was dispatched to the DNC, where his fundraising career began. What were his orders? What understanding did he have with Mr. Riady, Mr. Giroir, the president, and Mr. Lindsey?

Following the September meeting, Mr. Lindsey delegated details of Mr. Huang's DNC transfer to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes. In two White House "document dumps," Mr. Ickes provided congressional investigators with thousands of pages of memoranda and notes on the 1996 campaign. In addition to providing several tantalizing clues about the origins of the violations of campaign laws, Mr. Ickes's dozens of memos to the president and vice president paint a detailed portrait of Mr. Clinton's obsessive control of seemingly every aspect of the campaign. The president tracks the weekly flow of money raised; he drafts campaign literature appealing for funds; he reviews the scheduling of White House coffees and directs the DNC apparatus to "start overnights right away" with big donors in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Included among the Ickes documents is an intriguing set of notes relating to Mr. Huang. On Oct. 10, 1995, following Mr. Lindsey's instructions, Mr. Ickes meets with Mr. Huang. "Willing to work out of DNC," Mr. Ickes writes in a tight, at times illegible hand. "But needs a reasonable title." At the top of the page, Mr. Ickes cryptically notes: "Overseas Chinese group" and "55 million overseas Chinese." The number vastly exceeds the number of Chinese-Americans who can legally donate to political campaigns, and appears to point directly at non-U.S. residents being targeted for illegal contributions.

Mr. Huang's starburst career as a fund-raiser was launched. He quickly began raising millions, working with Mr. Trie and others. Published accounts have raised questions about Mr. Huang's contacts with Indonesian and Chinese sources after receiving high-level intelligence briefings, adding a specter of espionage to the funding controversy.

Mr. Trie, meanwhile, was also trying to help out his old friend Bill Clinton with some substantial donations to the Clintons' legal trust fund. In March 1996, he delivered the first of two installments of more than $600,000 in suspicious money orders to the Clinton legal trust. This problem also ended up in Mr. Ickes's notes. The solution? "Don't report names if $ are returned," Mr. Ickes wrote, adding at the bottom of the page the name "Betsey Wright," a Clinton damage-control expert. The money was returned, and the incident did not become public knowledge until after the election.

The millions continued to pour in throughout 1996, financing Mr. Clinton's expensive media air war against the GOP. At a July 1996 fund-raiser in California, the president saluted his "longtime friend John Huang," adding that Mr. Huang had been "so effective I was amazed you were all cheering for him tonight." Yet only a year after the California salute to Mr. Huang, the bulk of his millions have been earmarked for return by the Democrats and are the subject of congressional and criminal probes. How much did the president and the vice president know about the questionable activities when glasses were raised to Mr. Huang in July 1996? The Ickes documents suggest they knew a great deal.

This degree of direct presidential control of fundraising, indeed, strikes many long-time political observers as extraordinary. "His direct, hands-on involvement was risky, certainly in violation of the spirit of the law and possibly illegal," Bob Woodward of Watergate fame wrote in "The Choice," his book on the 1996 campaign. By January 1996, he wrote, President Clinton "personally had been controlling tens of millions of dollars worth of DNC advertising. This enabled him to exceed the legal spending limits and effectively rendered the DNC an adjunct to his own re-election effort."

All presidents are political, of course, but because of their official duties, nearly all have delegated political fundraising to keep some degree of insulation. The real question of the campaign finance probes is whether Messrs. Clinton and Gore obliterated these lines, turning their offices into fund-raising machines. The issue is not so much whether foreign contributors were trying to suborn the administration as whether the administration was shaking down foreign contributors.

Did the Lippo Group get policy preferences for its favors--perhaps, for example, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's signing of a deal, brokered by Mr. Giroir, for Lippo and Louisiana's Entergy Corp. to build a power plant in China. Were seats on Mr. Brown's trade missions for sale? Why precisely did the administration approve the transfer of high-technology aircraft manufacturing equipment from McDonnell Douglas to China despite the initial opposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Was former White House aide Mark Middleton dispatched to a jittery Taiwan to raise funds with the promise of the imminent arrival of the Seventh Fleet? If a president is willing to traduce the Lincoln Bedroom, can the Seventh Fleet be far behind?

"We were fighting a battle not simply for re-election," the president told a news conference shortly after his victory, "but over the entire direction of the country for years to come." Mr. Clinton's view of the difference between himself and Bob Dole may strike many as preposterous, but it is certainly suggests an anything-to-win attitude. What Sen. Thompson and his committee need to determine is whether this attitude led the president and his men to unleash John Huang, Charlie Trie and the rest knowing that laws would be broken. In criminal terms this is a conspiracy, and in Constitutional terms it is a breach of a president's duty to see that the law is faithfully executed.

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