During Senate hearings investigating the Clinton administration's alleged solicitations of illegal political campaign contributions from China and other foreign governments, Senator Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) warned that the hearings might provoke the sort of discrimination against Asians that he said was formerly directed against Italians as a result of the 1950-51 Kefauver hearings on organized crime. "It was only a flickering television screen, but I will never forget it," Torricelli said of the Mafia hearings, which as it turns out, concluded when the senator was only a few days old.

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