THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

September 15, 2000



REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT IN PHOTO OPPORTUNITY WITH PRIME MINISTER ATAL
BEHARI VAJPAYEE OF INDIA


The Oval Office



10:42 A.M. EDT



Q: Mr. President, if you always had doubts about whether Wen Ho Lee
should be in jail, why didn't you share those with us until yesterday?
And what do you say to Asian Americans who are concerned that his
ethnicity may have played some role in the fact he was detained for so
long?


THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I don't believe that. I don't think
there's any evidence of that. Let's look at the facts here.


He has admitted to a very serious national security violation. And the
most important thing now is that he keep his commitment to the
government to work hard to figure out what happened to those tapes,
what was on the tapes, to reconstitute all the information. That's
very important.


In America, we have a pretty high standard, and we should, under our
Constitution, against pre-trial detention. You have to meet a pretty
high bar. I had no reason to believe that that bar had not been met. I
think the fact that in such a short time frame there was an argument
that he needed to stay in jail without bail, and then all of a sudden
there was a plea agreement which was inconsistent with the claims
being made, I thought -- that raises a question not just for Chinese
Americans, but for all Americans, about whether we have been as
careful as we ought to be about pre-trial detention.


And that's something that -- you know, in a government like ours, that
was basically forged out of the concern for abusive executive
authority, we sometimes make mistakes, but we normally make mistakes
the other way, where we're bending over backwards. So that was my
narrow question. Our staff has talked to the Justice Department about
it. I'm sure I'll have a chance to talk to the Attorney General. It
would have been completely inappropriate for me to intervene. And I
don't believe she intervened. This was handled in the appropriate,
normal way.


But I want you to understand, there was a serious violation here. He
has acknowledged that. We have to get to the bottom of what was on all
the tapes. But the narrow thing that I want to illustrate here is that
when the United States, whenever we hold anybody in prison who can't
get bail or who is interned for a long period of time before being
charged and convicted and sentenced, we need to hit a very high
threshold. That is the specific thing I wanted to focus on. And I
think that there ought to be an analysis of whether or not that
threshold was crossed, in light of the plea bargain.


But the American people shouldn't be confused here. That was a very
serious offense and we've got to try to reconstitute what was on the
tapes. That's the number one thing we have to do for the national
security now.