Lobbyist Held Clinton Fund-Raiser on Night Before Favorable Ruling

WASHINGTON — A Democratic lobbyist who opposed a Chippewa Indian gambling casino hosted President Clinton at a fund-raiser the night before the Interior Department rejected the casino.

Videotapes released Thursday by the White House show Clinton attending the July 13, 1995, fund-raiser at the home of Thomas J. Schneider, a Washington lawyer who was working against the proposed Wisconsin casino.

Schneider hosted the $1,000-a-person fund-raiser in a tent on the lawn outside his home in Sandy Spring, Md.

He introduced Clinton as “my dear friend” and called him “one of the finest presidents we have had in the 20th century.” The fund-raiser raised $357,000 in donations to the Clinton-Gore ’96 campaign, said Peter O’Toole, a spokesman for the campaign.

“I hope everybody is charged up to go out in the next 18 months,” Schneider told donors at the conclusion of the event.

Schneider and Patrick O’Connor, a former Democratic Party treasurer, represented one of several tribes in Wisconsin and Minnesota that opposed construction of the Chippewa casino at a dog track in Hudson, Wis.

Rival tribes opposing the Hudson casino because it would compete with their own gaming outlets donated $286,000 to the Democratic Party, mostly after the Interior Department rejected the plan by three Chippewa bands on July 14, 1995.

The three losing tribes have filed lawsuits in Wisconsin alleging that the decision was improperly influenced by political considerations.

Schneider, who worked in the Washington office of O’Connor’s Minneapolis law firm, said in a court deposition that he secured a promise from then-Deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes to look into the gambling issue.

O’Connor personally lobbied Clinton on that issue at an April 1995 fund-raiser in Minnesota. In the next two months, aides to Ickes called the Interior Department three times to check on the status of the decision.

The White House has denied that it tried to influence the Interior Department’s decision on the casino.