The Scandal That Keeps on Giving
The pardon mess just keeps getting smellier
The dirty laundry of the Bill Clinton post-presidency just can't seem to get through a final rinse cycle. His midnight pardons of more than 140 felons seemed shocking enough. But just as the details of clemency for fugitive financier Marc Rich and herbal-supplement dealer Glenn Braswell slid off the front pages, Clinton was forced last week to confront reports that his brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, had accepted nearly $400,000 to plead the cases of Braswell and a convicted drug dealer--possibly through the back door of the White House.
Barely a month out of office, Clinton now has lower approval ratings than at any point in his eight years in the White House. The damage has been felt most immediately by his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and by his Democratic Party, where there is a rapidly diminishing pool of people to offer even a token defense of the former president. "It's causing a hell of a lot of problems," says Clinton's former Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, "because it's taking a lot of the oxygen out of the air before Democrats can make their case to the American people." Last week, Senator Clinton stood before the television cameras to offer a calibrated "I'm not my brother's keeper" defense, saying she was "deeply disappointed" in Rodham and decidedly out of the pardon loop. The former first couple insisted that Rodham return the money. The Florida Bar says it is conducting an investigation for possible violations of legal ethics. Rodham's lawyer says he did nothing wrong.
Even if that proves true, the senator probably faces questions about yet another set of pardons--for four Hasidic Jews in New York--and about the role of her Senate campaign treasurer in securing two additional clemencies. And then there's the little matter of Roger Clinton. The president's brother tried and failed to obtain clemency for 10 friends and associates.
And there's no end in sight. This past weekend, congressional investigators began poring over an initial batch of White House visitation logs, a process that eventually could track the time Hugh Rodham spent there in the final days of Clinton's presidency, a period when many of the 11th-hour pardon decisions were made. The logs will also allow them to track Rodham's movements within the private residence.
Disarmed. The swirl of controversy is nothing new for Bill Clinton, of course, but what is new is the lack of a scandal-scarred staff to deal with the mess. "What's going on here is that the weapons the president had to combat this stuff in the White House just aren't there," said one former lawyer in the White House counsel's office. "This is one of those situations where people just don't have anything they can really say."
Rarely speechless, the former president has stayed largely out of public view, issuing a one-paragraph statement in which he denied that either he or his wife knew anything about Rodham's "contingency fee" payment in connection with the Braswell pardon or the "fee" for commuting the sentence of convicted drug dealer Carlos Vignali. For congressional investigators and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White in New York, that will hardly be sufficient.
In Congress, the universe for investigation also is expanding. The House Government Reform Committee will now look into Rodham and Rich. The committee has subpoenaed records of the Clinton Library Foundation, seeking donor lists. It also demanded that foundation president Skip Rutherford appear before the committee to testify on March 1. Investigators were angered by what they saw as a lawyerly nonresponse from foundation lawyer David Kendall. "It was a whole lot of zip," said committee spokesman Mark Corallo. Investigators want to comb the donor list for possible connections between pledges to the libraries and pardons. The documents that have been turned over confirm that Rich's ex-wife Denise gave $450,000.
Pardons for votes? A federal law enforcement source confirmed that U.S. Attorney White, who has an ongoing criminal investigation of the Rich pardon, also is investigating whether Clinton commuted the sentences of four convicted swindlers in exchange for votes for Hillary Clinton from their Hasidic community in New Square, N.Y. The four men were convicted of stealing more than $40 million worth of grants and loans by creating a fictitious school.
The pardon controversy is not the first time Hugh Rodham has embarrassed the Clintons. "Whenever his name came up, people would just roll their eyes," one former White House aide said. Rodham was unlucky in politics and in business. He lost a U.S. Senate race by a landslide in 1994, then several years later he and his brother, Tony, pulled out of a business deal with the Republic of Georgia to export hazelnuts after White House officials persuaded them to drop the venture.
It remains unclear how Rodham knew Braswell or whether Braswell, who has a habit of retaining armies of well-connected lawyers, hired him solely for the assignment of courting favor with his brother-in-law. Braswell also had been represented in his pardon efforts by Kendall Coffey, who worked for former Vice President Al Gore during the Florida recount. Coffey did not return phone calls. Some of Rodham's contacts were through Bruce Lindsey, the former White House deputy counsel and a close Clinton friend. As with so many of the Clinton contretemps, there were more questions about the pardons than answers--a point the senator seemed to acknowledge when she said the former president should "put those reasons out."
This story appears in the March 5, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.