Had Hillary Rodham Clinton and Harold Ickes listed to Michael Cardozo, the White House might have avoided at least one fund-raising embarrassment last year. Mr. Cardozo, the director of the Clintons' legal defense fund, warned them that there was something fishy about the contributions that Yah Lin (Charlie) Trie had offered the fund. Yet the White House and the Democratic National Committee continued to exploit Mr. Trie's money-raising skills for the Clinton re-election campaign, and the White House actually named him to a Federal advisory board.

On Tuesday the Senate committee investigating campaign fund-raising learned how Mr. Trie, an Arkansas restaurateur, raised piles of money for the D.N.C. from shadowy Asian sources in an effort to further his new career in international trade. Yesterday the committee learned that the resourceful Mr. Trie had seen an equally promising opportunity in the Presidential Legal Expense Trust, a fund set up to help Clintons pay $2 million in legal bills arising largely from the Whitewater case.

Mr. Trie first presented himself to Mr. Cardozo in March 1996, bearing $460,000 in a plain brown envelope. Mr. Cardozo rejected $70,000 in obviously dubious checks and money orders, many of which bore the same handwriting, and stashed the rest in a lockbox pending an investigation. In the next few weeks Mr. Trie returned with a sack containing $170,000 in checks, and then again with $150,000. He was sent away both times. The fund, which learned that the money had come from a Buddhist sect and feared that the sect's members might have been coerced, eventually returned the balance of the original $460,000 contribution.

The crucial point about this sequence is that the White House, and presumably the D.N.C., were well aware of Mr. Cardozo's doubts about Mr. Trie but did nothing to restrict his access to the White House or his activities at the D.N.C. Mr. Cardozo disclosed that he was investigating the source of Mr. Trie's donations at a meeting in April 1996 with the First Lady and Mr. Ickes, the White's House's point man with the D.N.C. Nevertheless, President Clinton appointed Mr. Trie to an advisory panel on Asian trade two weeks later, and thereafter Mr. Trie visited the White House five times for various briefings, dinners and photo opportunities.