The Unpardonable Pardon

...Clintonism has become so accepted that no one even blinks when a president's former chief political adviser says, plausibly and without qualification, that an outgoing president was blackmailed into giving a pardon...

...The answer to this question about Clinton's last act as president may lie in an episode from the dawn of his career as a chief executive...

...What does this old, obscure political tale have to do with Marc Rich...

...You're saying they paid, they paid in full, and they've been out long enough after their sentence to show they are good citizens...

...His biographer A. Craig Copetas called him "the most wanted white-collar criminal in America" and quoted unnamed Justice Department officials shortly after Rich's abrupt departure for Switzerland as deeming him "the most corrupt corporate executive in America...

...Bill Clinton seems to have learned from Ray Blanton how not to carry out end-of-term pardons...

...After describing a complex series of transactions between BCCI and Rich, the report concludes, "The nature and extent of Rich's relationship with BCCI requires further investigation...

...But if Bill Clinton simply wanted to recruit a Grateful Felons Finance Committee for Hillary, he could have done so right here in the good old U.S.A...

...A man named Ray Blanton had been governor of Tennessee for four years and had been an embarrassment to Tennesseans...

...Media coverage has focused on Rich's business activities in Switzerland and Iran...

...That's a lot of variations, but Clinton managed to find a way to James Higgins is an adjunct fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy...

...He dealt with criminals who were not very smart and not very wealthy...

...Rich's stock in trade is reported to be false documents, usually to disguise the origin, path, or destination of a commodity, usually in order to evade a tax or prohibition...

...Bill Clinton arrived in Washington telling us that he would "put people first...

...Most media speculation, though, has focused on the influence of Rich's new lawyer, and Clinton's old lawyer, Jack Quinn...

...Blanton lacked the ruthlessness and cunning to get away with it...

...But those aren't the only places Rich made the several billion coins in his piggy bank...

...And Clinton himself, asked about his last-minute pardons on his first day as a private citizen, replied inimitably, "You're not saying these people didn't commit an offense...

...His quid pro quos were blatant: pardons for money...

...The Lewinsky case, similarly, is just what Clinton was caught at...

...Had Rich's lawyers gone through the usual channels to apply for a pardon, word of the dealings he is believed to have with Iraq would certainly have come out during the law enforcement community's review of the pardon application...

...Rich has been described in the South African press as "the most prolific buster of the oil embargo...

...The most obvious explanation is that Rich's ex-wife Denise has become a major donor and fund-raiser for the Clintons...

...No propaganda minister could have written a more fitting postscript for the Clinton administration, since, at least as regards Marc Rich, there was not a particle of truth in what Clinton said...

...BY JAMES HIGGINS LATE-NIGHT COMEDIANS have done much to persuade Americans that Bill Clinton's finger-wagging "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" denial was the action that captured the essence of his presidency...

...In the very same year the departing Blanton was selling pardons, an ambitious 32-year-old won his first term as governor of the state next door...

...Betrayal of unmoneyed political allies of principle in favor of moneyed allies of convenience...

...And, to the fury of the law enforcement community, the unrepentant fugitive has now won a pardon without serving a day in jail or even standing trial...

...Following the election, before the new governor was sworn in, Blanton began pardoning inmates wholesale...

...he and also-pardoned associate "Pinky" Green, facing indictment, fled the United States in 1983 and never returned...

...Onetime Clinton pollster Dick Morris has gone so far as to suggest that Quinn knows where so many Clinton skeletons are buried his request could not be turned down...

...The U.S...

...We had to learn the hard way that by "people" he meant himself, his cronies, and a billionaire fugitive felon called, perfectly, Mr...

...Oversized descriptions seem to fit Rich...

...trade sanctions...

...Denise Rich first had a publicist deny that she was involved in seeking the pardon...

...And he issued pardons long enough before he left office to attract attention to what he was doing while it was still going on...

...An attractive divorcee making repeated visits to the White House...

...capture all of them just by signing his name to the Rich pardon...

...Whatever else one may say about the Clintons, they do learn from the errors of others...

...Rich's unsavory associations don't stop with South Africa...

...Just how could Clinton have gotten the idea and audacity for the Rich pardon...

...It's the antagonism, even malevolence, toward the justice system that makes Clinton's parting shot seem so pathological...

...Fink subsequently claimed that Rich's case could not go to the Department of Justice because Rich had never been convicted...

...Alexander sorted out the mess and in doing so established his reputation as an honest and efficient governor...

...Attorney's office got word that Blanton was selling pardons, rushed Blanton off the stage early and had Alexander sworn in ahead of schedule...

...history...

...A staffer on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, Hillary Rodham Clinton learned from watching Richard Nixon how not to conduct a cover-up...

...But another Rich relationship may better explain his lawyers' decision to circumvent the usual review process...

...By the time the media began to realize on January 20 what Clinton had done on his way out the door, Clinton and his staff had sacked the White House offices, departed, and were already looting Air Force One en route to New York...

...Presidential actions so far outside the bounds of decency that no observer and no other president could even have conceived of them in advance...

...Blanton went to prison on corruption charges...

...He needn't have gone as far as Zug, Switzerland, with a pardon he must have known would enrage law enforcement officials...

...In the 1980s the commodity was oil, and the customer was apartheid South Africa, then under U.N...

...Recall that in August 1998 Clinton excluded four of the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from learning in advance about the bombing of a medicine factory in the Sudan—a bombing that managed to blast Monica Lewinsky's deposition off the front page...

...Then, when a December 2000 letter from her to Bill Clinton asking for the pardon came to light, she remembered that, oh yes, she had been involved...

...His name turns up in a 1992 report by senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Hank Brown (R-CO) to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about BCCI, once the global one-stop banking supermarket for arms traffickers, drug dealers, and money launderers...

...Could such a quick study and news addict as William Jefferson Clinton have failed to notice the extensive media coverage coming into Arkansas from Memphis TV stations and other news outlets...

...Why would Clinton have pardoned such a man...

...One can easily picture Denise Rich, along with a number of last-minute par-donees and their friends and family, playing an important role in funding Hillary Clinton's future political career...

...Hearing the name A1 Capone, we don't think of the gangster hunched over a desk, smirking as he signs a false income tax return, though it was income tax evasion that was Capone's downfall...

...Tolerance of treason...

...But the moral rot was much more profound, as became clear even to the president's defenders with his last minute pardon of Marc Rich...

...By now the basics of the Marc Rich case have become well known: He carried out the largest income tax evasion in U.S...

...But it wasn't...

...One Rich lawyer, Robert F. Fink, claimed that "We couldn't get people to meet and talk with us...

...And it's true that she visited Clinton at the White House many times...

...If true, that would be in Rich's long tradition of trading with the enemy...

...And all of this covered by lies, small and large...

...he did business with the Ayatollah Khomeini in violation of the Trading With the Enemy Act while the staff of the U.S...

...Pardoning the man who kept apartheid's engines running was Bill Clinton's thanks to his most loyal supporters, the African-American community in the United States...

...Presidential embrace of characters previous presidents would have dealt with using the FBI or the military...

...If circumventing proper channels in order to reach an inexcusable decision sounds like another familiar variation of Clintonism, it's because we've seen it before...

...Turn back the clock to December 1978...

...The next year Bill Clinton came to the White House, and the "further investigation" seems never to have happened...

...Embassy were being held hostage in Iran...

...Blanton did not run for reelection in 1978, and 38-year-old Lamar Alexander won the open seat...

...Rich's lawyers and Denise Rich's publicists have trotted out a series of excuses for having circumvented the usual Department of Justice review process in seeking a pardon for Rich...

...Betrayal of unmoneyed political allies has been another theme of Clintonism, a theme that recurs in the Rich pardon...

...Clinton, the master political tactician of our time, saved for last the one action that weaves together every major variation on the sociopathic fugue that was Clintonism: Big dollars for Democrat coffers...

...Sources in the oil trading community in the United States believe that Rich has in recent years done business with Iraq...