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According to AsianWeek, Asian Americans are not happy with Barack Obama’s pick of Bill Richardson as his secretary of the U.S. Commerce Department. And it all dates back to the last time Richardson served as a cabinet secretary under a president — his stint as secretary of energy under President Bill Clinton.
Of course, Richardson has not yet been officially announced as Obama’s commerce secretary, but many outlets have reported the official announcement will come this week.
More specifically, there are still memories of the Wen Ho Lee case, where the Taiwanese-born Lee was accused of stealing classified nuclear-related documents from the Los Alamos Laboratories. Richardson, as the energy secretary, was heavily involved in leveling criminal highly-charged accusations against Lee.
Lee eventually pleaded guilty to lesser charges, and the incident is considered one of the black marks on Richardson’s career. To many Asian Americans, it is a black mark that shouldn’t be easily forgotten.
“Richardson inflamed the stereotype that Americans of Chinese descent are easily disloyal citizens of our country,” said Henry Der who was Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action in the 1990s. Der called upon members of the Senate Commerce Committee to investigate Richardson’s conduct as secretary of energy during Richardson’s confirmation hearings.
For critics like Der, Richardson’s refusal to acknowledge his own misconduct during the scandal remains a bitter sticking point.
“[He] needs to… apologize for the grave, calculated mistakes and harm he perpetrated against Lee and our nation’s sense of justice,” Der said.
According to the nationally syndicated radio program Democracy Now!, Richardson has changed his tune on his stance on how the Lee case was handled in recent years. In a December 2007 debate in Iowa, Richardson admitted some mistakes in the handling of the case.
The program played a short clip of Richardson’s remarks at the debate, but the New York Times has the full answer:
Well, and I — and I will add that in 25 years in public service, there are probably many more other mistakes that I’ve made, but I want to say to you that when it was with Wen Ho Lee, this was the issue of protecting our nuclear secrets.
And he did plead guilty. I do feel that he was incarcerated in solitary confinement. This was wrong. I tried to change it, but I didn’t work hard enough.
The point is that we do have in all of our lives — as a congressman, as a U.N. ambassador, as a candidate, I’ve made a lot of gaffes, and I’m glad you didn’t raise them. (Laughter.) But, you know, I’ll stand — I’ll stand behind my record as energy secretary. I brought compensation to workers that had beryllium, another contamination. I brought forth a renewable portfolio standard, the first one, that says electricity has to be renewable in this country. We made air conditioning 30 percent more energy efficient.
There are some cases in the Wen Ho Lee where I wish I’d been stronger, but I don’t apologize for trying to protect our nuclear secrets, and we should have done a lot more.
Democracy Now! played part of a 2005 interview with Richardson. In that clip, Richardson said, “There were some mistakes in that case. It involved the entire federal government, and I stand behind everything that I did.”
