A blow to Asian-American groups

When Korean immigrant Jay Kim stood on the hustings during his campaign for a House of Representatives seat in 1992, he pledged to fight in Washington for reform of the shoddy political finance laws.

Kim, whose seat in the affluent suburbs of Los Angeles includes former president Richard Nixon's birthplace at Yorba Linda, won the race and is still serving that district after having been twice re-elected. But if anyone had any reason to believe that he - like any other political hack desperate to enter the corridors of power - meant what he said about campaign finance when he was courting the people's vote, they can now safely ditch any such illusions.

Kim and his wife paid a visit to an LA courthouse earlier this week to plead guilty to illegal activity during his 1992 campaign even as he was publicly denouncing it to the voters.

It is the sort of activity - illegal receipts of foreign cash - that has been the focus of Senate hearings and media investigations for nearly a year.

Kim may be a Republican, not a Clinton Democrat, and his malfeasance may have taken place long before anyone had heard of James Riady or Charlie Trie. But it all goes to show that when it comes to the horror story of dirty money in Washington, the plot stretches back far further than one might have thought.

Kim's story, given its ramifications, has had remarkably little coverage in the national media, outside his hometown, where a series of scoops in the Los Angeles Times during 1993 alerted the FBI to the congressman's chaotic and illegal campaign finances.