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Jewish World Review Feb. 22, 2001 / 29 Shevat, 5761

Michael Kelly

Michael Kelly
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The Pardoner's false brief


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- FORMER president Clinton finally has offered his first serious attempt at a defense of the pardons he granted in the last hours of his presidency, when he bypassed the Justice Department protocols system to issue clemency to scores of moneyed and connected special pleaders. The argument is in almost every important way a lie.

The first big lie is contextual. Clinton portrays his exceptional abuse of the pardoning power as unexceptional. All presidents, writes Clinton in a 1,700-word op-ed article in Sunday's New York Times, have used their power to pardon, and "some of the uses of the power have been extremely controversial." He cites examples of controversial pardons by Washington, Harding, Nixon, Ford, Carter and the first Bush. But no other president ever did what Clinton did. Others may have in a rare case or two abused their power, but none sought to corrupt the pardoning process on a wholesale basis. None set up a secret shop to bypass his own government and speed through the special pleas of the well connected and the well heeled. None sent the Justice Department dozens of names for pardon on inauguration morning, too late for the department to run even cursory checks.

The second big lie is also contextual. In the specific case of the alleged (and indicted) tax scammers and billionaire fugitives Marc Rich and Pincus Green, Clinton offers eight reasons for what he says was a decision "on the merits as I saw them" . . . "in the best interests of justice."

Regard the carefully coy fashion in which Clinton describes how he came to be aware of "the merits." He writes: "I understood"; and "I was informed that"; and "it was my understanding that." Understood how? Informed by whom? Understood from and informed by Jack Quinn, the six-figure attorney hired by Rich and Green.

Clinton carefully limited what he saw of the "merits" of the Rich case to that which Rich's lawyer thought he should see. He never sought recommendations from any appropriate Justice officials and indeed hid his actions from them. He now tells us that he knew when he pardoned Rich and Green that the official directly in charge of the Rich case, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, "did not support these pardons," but he never spoke to her. It was his Quinn-based "understanding" that Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder was "neutral, leaning for" a pardon, but he never talked directly to Holder either. Holder now says (admittedly, with self-interest) that he had assumed the Rich application was so out of the question that it never would be granted. "I believed the essential facts were before me," writes Clinton. Yes, essential as determined and interpreted by one side in the case.

The third big lie is again contextual, and is one of omission. Clinton cites, as reason No. 3 for a pardon, the fact that "two highly regarded tax experts" had examined the financial transactions in the Rich case and concluded that Rich's companies had not violated any tax law. What Clinton does not say is that the two experts were acting as Rich's hired guns -- they wrote their assessment clearing Rich specifically for use in Rich's defense under a $100,000 contract with Rich's lawyers.

The fourth and most stunning lie is a flat-outer, reason No. 7: "the applications were reviewed and advocated not only by my former White House counsel Jack Quinn [note the reflexive passing lie of omission; the important identifier of Quinn is not former White House counsel but counsel for Marc Rich] but also by three distinguished Republican attorneys: Leonard Garment, a former Nixon White House official; William Bradford Reynolds, a former high-ranking official in the Reagan Justice Department; and Lewis Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff."

This is how the statement appeared in copies of the Times printed before 12:45 p.m. Saturday. Later copies contained a change, dictated by Clinton's people, desperately trying to backtrack. In the altered version, Clinton writes that "the case for the pardons [not the applications per se] was reviewed and advocated" etc.

Both versions are howlers. The suggestion here is that some sort of panel of "distinguished Republican attorneys" had examined and supported Quinn's case for a Rich pardon. In fact, Garment, Reynolds and Libby had been, at one time or another, lawyers for Rich; in this for-hire capacity, they had written arguments for leniency for Rich. But all three distinguished Republicans leaped to say they had never supported this pardon, either the applications in particular or Quinn's "case" in general.

Eight reasons; four lies. Not bad, even for the old master himself.


Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

Up

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02/01/01: Exit the abusers
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01/04/01: Faux Commotion
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12/06/00: Gore's next task: Face reality
11/29/00: BURN THAT VILLAGE!
11/22/00: SEND IN THE THUGS
11/15/00: The Great Defender
11/02/00: The Democrats' delusion
10/26/00: Phony Truce
10/19/00: The Talking Cure
10/12/00: Doves' Day of Reckoning
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08/17/00: The Joyful Clinton Nation
08/09/00: A Calculated Risk
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07/13/00: President With a Porpoise
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06/21/00: Gore and the Goodies
06/15/00: Network Snooze
06/01/00: Sunshine on My Shoulders
05/24/00: Last Chance for a Hardened Prevaricator
05/17/00: Cuomo's Thought Police
05/10/00: Hammering DeLay
05/04/00: Some Closing Thoughts
04/28/00: Endangering Elian
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04/05/00: Census and nonesense
03/29/00: The Stiffs and Their Statuettes
03/15/00: Anarchy in Kosovo
03/08/00: Reform joke
03/01/00:The Pinhead Factor
03/01/00: The Christian Right: Past Its Prime . . .
02/24/00: McCain's Majority
02/16/00: Sharpton's Supplicants
02/09/00: The GOP Pilgrims' Sad Tale
02/02/00: Fodder For the GOP
01/26/00: Million-Dollar Mediocrity
01/19/00: Campaign Reform: Let's Pretend
01/12/00: Never Again? Oh, Never Mind
01/05/00: Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In
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12/15/99: Campaigns Do Clarify
12/08/99: Kosovo's Killers
12/01/99: Not Ready for Prime Time?
11/24/99: The Company He Keeps
11/17/99: Republican Illusion
11/10/99: The Know-Nothing Media
11/03/99: Necessary Partisanship
10/27/99: Buchanan's Gift to George W. Bush
10/21/99: Who are the real friends of the poor?
10/14/99: Gore's 'courage'!?
10/08/99: Republican Stunts
09/23/99: Buchanan's folly
09/16/99: Beatty and Buchanan: That's Entertainment!
09/09/99: Puerto Rico Surprise (Cont'd)
09/02/99: Puerto Rico Surprise
08/12/99:The Age of No Class
08/05/99: Assessing Welfare Reform
07/29/99: On the Wrong Side
07/21/99: Mass Sentimentality
07/15/99: Blame Hillary
07/08/99: Guide to the Arts: For Your Summer Reading . . .
06/30/99: A Perfectly Clintonian Doctrine
06/25/99:Smorgasbord by the Sea
06/16/99: A National Calamity
06/09/99: Stumbling Forward
06/02/99: Commencement '90s-Style
05/26/99: Will we ever learn? Clintochio is a lying ...
05/19/99: Comforting Milosevic
05/13/99: Short-Order Strategists
05/06/99: Four Revolting Spectacles

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