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Stars' checks tell Clinton's fortune

BY GLENN THRUSH | Newsday Washington Bureau

July 20, 2006

WASHINGTON - J.Lo is high on Hillary.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's merciless assault on the checkbooks of Beverly Hills accelerated during the second quarter of 2006, with fresh cash coming from the likes of Jennifer Lopez ($4,200), her husband, Marc Anthony ($4,200), Tom Hanks ($2,100), "Wedding Crashers" star Owen Wilson ($2,100), Disney chief executive Robert Iger ($2,100) and Long Island's Billy Crystal ($4,000).

Clinton, who has $22 million in the bank and raised $5.2 million from April to July, even managed to scare up $2,100 from Chris Rock, who used to devote a big chunk of his comedy act to exploring intimate details of the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Donald Trump's ex-wife Marla Maples gave Clinton $2,000, as did Bill Clinton's campaign manager James Carville, the Federal Election Commission form shows. At 4,000 pages, the filing is about half the size of the World Book encyclopedia.

It shows the senator making inroads in the sports world, drawing donations from baseball home run king Hank Aaron ($300), former New York Rangers goalie Mike Richter ($4,200), ex-Knicks coach Herb Williams ($1,000) and Islanders co-owner Charles Wang, who has given Friends of Hillary $2,750 this year.

But the most intriguing entries were two of the smallest: $300 worth of charges to the Hampton Inn at 5001 Fleur Dr. in Des Moines, Iowa, for two nights in April and May. Clinton and her staff have stayed conspicuously far from Iowa, the kick-off state in 2008, to avoid speculation that they are looking past the 2006 Senate campaign to the White House.

Friends of Hillary communications director Ann Lewis said the charges were a bizarre, inexplicable clerical error.

"It caused quite a stir on our office," she said yesterday. "But one of them was actually a staffer who went to Texas and the other was a photographer in Albany who went to F.O.H. events. ... We don't know how it was billed to Iowa."

Clinton's potential GOP opponents, John Spencer and KT McFarland, raised less than $1 million between them during the spring, a fraction of what the senator spent in the same period.

The senator's re-election campaign spent $1.1 million on five direct-mail, telemarketing and polling firms as part of the effort to build a nationwide operation. Clinton also paid out $144,000 to media guru Mandy Grunwald.

Bold-face donors

Marc Anthony

$4,200

Owen Wilson

$2,100

Billy Crystal

$4,000

Hank Aaron

$300

Jennifer Lopez

$4,200