Nobody in the White House or Justice Department appears to have known who Tom Bhakta was. Not really. They didn’t know where he lived, so the address boxes on all the relevant forms were left blank. They didn’t even know how to spell his name; it came out “Bhatka” on both the president’s executive order and the DOJ clemency warrant that order generated. But despite such confusion, and helped along by it, too, Tom Bhakta of Bentonville, Arkansas, convicted in 1991 of federal income tax evasion, secured an absolute and perpetual pardon for his crimes. As did 175 other men and women with checkered legal pasts, all during the frantic werewolf hours of Bill Clinton’s final half-day in public office. There are more than a few people on this list — the infamous billionaire fugitive Marc Rich is only one of them — who seem altogether preposterous candidates for presidential grace. There are several dozen people on the list, indeed, for whom a pardon would have been all but impossible had not Clinton engineered a surreptitious, months-long campaign to circumvent his own official policy on clemency procedures. That circumvention since exposed, the country is now treated to another major revival of His Usual Scandal, words, music, and cast essentially unchanged. Imputations of personal and political financial corruption are made. A criminal probe gets underway. The responsible Clinton appointee at the Justice Department, Eric Holder, attempts to deflect criticism of his acquiescence in the White House pardon scheme by complaining that he was kept largely in the dark about the whole thing until it was too late — which isn’t entirely true. In the Washington super-fixer role made famous by Vernon Jordan, former White House counsel and current Marc Rich hireling Jack Quinn proclaims that everything was by the book, on the merits, clean as a whistle: “The process I followed was one of transparency” — which is laughably false. Substituting for the indisposed Maria Hsia, Denise Rich invokes her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. David Kendall, who is ageless, promises he will litigate to the death any attempt to subpoena key documents spirited out of the White House to Little Rock on Inauguration Day. And the former president? He did not have sexual relations with that pardon, and he did not ask anyone to lie about it, not once, never: “There’s not a single, solitary shred of evidence that I did anything wrong,” he fumes. He only tried to “go out there and do what past presidents have done.” Unfortunately, “the Republicans had other plans for me,” which, as you know, is their vast, right-wing custom. Here, as always, Bill Clinton simply plays himself. Funny thing, though: Where until recently the very same performance invariably delighted his many fans and won at least grudging acceptance from the most influential newspaper reviewers, today, lickety-split, word of mouth on the Clinton show has turned horrible. Elected Democrats, almost to a man, are openly disgusted with their erstwhile leader. And the editorial pages are virtually beside themselves with rage. “Sordid” and “inexcusable,” thunders the New York Times. A “constitutional abuse” of “breathtaking irresponsibility.” Hard to disagree with that. But hard not to conclude, as well, that there’s something rather peculiar about the membership and intensity of this post-pardon Anti-Clinton League. Exactly what’s the point, for example? Granted, where the aroma of crime attaches to a president, the law must be enforced both for its own sake and for history’s. And once again Clinton smells a fair bit, this time of something like bribery. Denise Rich gave well over $1 million to various organizations controlled by the former president. She and Jack Quinn then used one of the people through whom she’d made those contributions, former Democratic National Committee finance chairman Beth Dozoretz, as a go-between with Clinton on the Marc Rich pardon. And two other such Rich-to-Clinton money funnels, now-DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe and Peter O’Keefe of the Clinton presidential library foundation, have since become principals in the retired president’s pardon-related damage-control effort. One would not ordinarily expect to find fund-raising operatives so intimately connected to the exercise of a constitutional authority. But. We don’t think it all that likely that any explicit and therefore criminal quid pro quo will ever be discovered in Clinton’s grant of clemency to Marc Rich or anyone else, especially given the code of omert that generally surrounds this most shadowy and secretive of presidents. What’s more, we don’t think the question of technical criminality should any longer be the paramount concern. Consider: Round about the time Tom Bhakta began plotting his own pardon last October, he and his immediate family gave $5,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign. But before those checks were drafted, Bhakta had somehow already gleaned that he would be allowed to bypass standard vetting procedures at the Justice Department and ship his clemency petition right to the West Wing. “Beginning last fall,” according to the New York Times, “the notion began to circulate among potential applicants that the White House might be receptive to direct proposals for pardons, said current and former government officials, pardon applicants, and lawyers. The result, these people said, was a mad search around the country for lawyers with contacts in the Clinton administration.” The phenomenon has since been confirmed by the Los Angeles Times in the course of its excellent reporting on Carlos Vignali, another Clinton pardonee. Vignali was released from prison less than halfway through his 15-year sentence for organizing a large-scale cocaine trafficking network. “How’d you get out?” his astonished lawyer asked him. “Word around prison was that it was the right time to approach the president,” Vignali replied. Unbelievable, no? And though it is legal — for a president may confer clemency whichever way and to however many unrepentant drug dealers he pleases — does such connivance not by itself constitute a violation of that president’s constitutional oath and a major abuse of power? Which is the “it” most Clinton neo-critics now insist Must Never Happen Again. There is talk on Capitol Hill of amending the Constitution to circumscribe the president’s pardoning prerogative. We’re inclined to believe this is a bad idea in its own right, and we’re quite sure it is useless for present purposes. After all, any future president willing to ride roughshod over the founding document will by definition be a president none too scrupulously concerned with what that document says, whether or not we amend it. Senator Arlen Specter’s embarrassingly frivolous notion that we might impeach Bill Clinton a second time similarly fails the test of utility. The search for foolproof prophylaxis against a recurrence of Clintonian anti-constitutionalism in the White House will not, alas, avail. The nation will go on as before, with only the vigilance of its citizens and their representatives to depend on. And that’s the rub. The Marc Rich affair represents a failure of such vigilance. Forget that it must never happen again, and remember that it needn’t and shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Some of those angriest with him today concede that this latest scandal is not at all anomalous, but rather, as the Washington Post puts it, “classic Clinton,” consistent with the general pattern of his presidency. He was a man who abused his powers. It was obvious to some of us more than three years ago, when he stood accused of crimes much more thoroughly documented than any under investigation today, and when he was busy manipulating the executive branch of government into a personal palace guard. Had Bill Clinton then been removed from office, as we suggested, such abuses would have ended. But Arlen Specter and the Washington Post and a sizable majority of the voting public instead decided to pardon the president. Now, by a parting pardon of his own, Clinton has mocked the indulgence of his one-time defenders and made them out for fools. We are not surprised that so many of them are hot about it. But, really: At some irreducible level, they have only themselves to blame.
