ASHINGTON - Staff memos to Vice President Al Gore describe his visit to a Buddhist Temple event as a fund-raiser and suggest he bring $20 as ''an offering,'' according to reconstructed White House e-mails kept from investigators until yesterday.
The messages are some of more than 100,000 e-mails the White House never properly archived. As a result, they weren't reviewed to determine whether they should have been sent under subpoena to investigators on topics ranging from fund-raising to Whitewater and impeachment.
They were reconstructed recently from backup tapes, in part because of pressure from a federal judge. They are being turned over to Congress and were provided this summer to independent counsel Robert Ray and the Justice Department, which had subpoenaed them.
Gore spokesman Jim Kennedy said the e-mails contain ''nothing of significance.''
One e-mail urged the vice president to take $20 along on the trip to the Buddhist temple in California. ''The VP will need to have some cash on hand (Ladon recommended $20) to offer as an offering at the Buddhist temple in LA,'' the message said.
The e-mails show the Gore staff considered the April 1996 event at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple near Los Angeles was a fund-raiser. Gore originally said it was a community outreach. He later said he knew it was ''donor-related.''
''Currently, we are committed in San Jose and LA for fund-raising events,'' one staff e-mail said about the trip.
One message details an apparent offer from Taiwanese-American businessman George Chang in Virginia to raise $250,000 if the Democratic National Committee would arrange his request for a White House coffee and a Clinton interview with a Taiwanese reporter.
The long-missing messages, turned over to the House Government Reform Committee, chaired by Representative Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, also show Gore's staff sought a way to keep the vice president's e-mails from being archived by the White House system.
''All Internet e-mails are recorded on the White House computers,'' an e-mail to Gore warned in 1996 when Gore's media adviser Carter Eskew sought a way to send messages to Gore.
''The only way not to have your e-mails backed up on government computers would be to get a Clinton-Gore computer in your office and set it up for private e-mails,'' the memo said.
Kennedy said the material about the $250,000 was turned over to Capitol Hill more than three years ago.
The offer of $250,000 came through Democratic fund-raiser John Huang, a key figure in the 1996 political money controversy.
The half-inch thick stack of messages was reconstructed from Gore's office and contains several e-mails that conflict with the White House's original explanations that the Buddhist temple event and White House coffees weren't fund-raisers.
