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. But it wasn’t.
Hearing the name Al 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. The Lewinsky case, similarly, is just what Clinton was caught at.
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. 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. Tolerance of treason. An attractive divorcee making repeated visits to the White House. Betrayal of unmoneyed political allies of principle in favor of moneyed allies of convenience. Presidential actions so far outside the bounds of decency that no observer and no other president could even have conceived of them in advance. Presidential embrace of characters previous presidents would have dealt with using the FBI or the military. And all of this covered by lies, small and large. That’s a lot of variations, but Clinton managed to find a way to capture all of them just by signing his name to the Rich pardon.
By now the basics of the Marc Rich case have become well known: He carried out the largest income tax evasion in U.S. history; he did business with the Ayatollah Khomeini in violation of the Trading With the Enemy Act while the staff of the U.S. Embassy were being held hostage in Iran; he and also-pardoned associate “Pinky” Green, facing indictment, fled the United States in 1983 and never returned. 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.
Oversized descriptions seem to fit Rich. 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.”
Why would Clinton have pardoned such a man? The most obvious explanation is that Rich’s ex-wife Denise has become a major donor and fund-raiser for the Clintons. And it’s true that she visited Clinton at the White House many times. One can easily picture Denise Rich, along with a number of last-minute pardonees and their friends and family, playing an important role in funding Hillary Clinton’s future political career. 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. He needn’t have gone as far as Zug, Switzerland, with a pardon he must have known would enrage law enforcement officials. It’s the antagonism, even malevolence, toward the justice system that makes Clinton’s parting shot seem so pathological.
Betrayal of unmoneyed political allies has been another theme of Clintonism, a theme that recurs in the Rich pardon. Media coverage has focused on Rich’s business activities in Switzerland and Iran. But those aren’t the only places Rich made the several billion coins in his piggy bank.
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. In the 1980s the commodity was oil, and the customer was apartheid South Africa, then under U.N. trade sanctions. Rich has been described in the South African press as “the most prolific buster of the oil embargo.” 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.
Rich’s unsavory associations don’t stop with South Africa. 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. 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.” The next year Bill Clinton came to the White House, and the “further investigation” seems never to have happened.
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. Denise Rich first had a publicist deny that she was involved in seeking the pardon. 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. One Rich lawyer, Robert F. Fink, claimed that “We couldn’t get people to meet and talk with us.” Fink subsequently claimed that Rich’s case could not go to the Department of Justice because Rich had never been convicted.
Most media speculation, though, has focused on the influence of Rich’s new lawyer, and Clinton’s old lawyer, Jack Quinn. 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. 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.
But another Rich relationship may better explain his lawyers’ decision to circumvent the usual review process. Sources in the oil trading community in the United States believe that Rich has in recent years done business with Iraq. If true, that would be in Rich’s long tradition of trading with the enemy. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.” 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.
Just how could Clinton have gotten the idea and audacity for the Rich 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.
Turn back the clock to December 1978. A man named Ray Blanton had been governor of Tennessee for four years and had been an embarrassment to Tennesseans. Blanton did not run for reelection in 1978, and 38-year-old Lamar Alexander won the open seat. Following the election, before the new governor was sworn in, Blanton began pardoning inmates wholesale. The U.S. Attorney’s office got word that Blanton was selling pardons, rushed Blanton off the stage early and had Alexander sworn in ahead of schedule. Blanton went to prison on corruption charges. Alexander sorted out the mess and in doing so established his reputation as an honest and efficient governor.
What does this old, obscure political tale have to do with Marc Rich? 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. 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?
Blanton lacked the ruthlessness and cunning to get away with it. He dealt with criminals who were not very smart and not very wealthy. His quid pro quos were blatant: pardons for money. And he issued pardons long enough before he left office to attract attention to what he was doing while it was still going on.
Whatever else one may say about the Clintons, they do learn from the errors of others. A staffer on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, Hillary Rodham Clinton learned from watching Richard Nixon how not to conduct a cover-up. Bill Clinton seems to have learned from Ray Blanton how not to carry out end-of-term pardons. 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.
Bill Clinton arrived in Washington telling us that he would “put people first.” We had to learn the hard way that by “people” he meant himself, his cronies, and a billionaire fugitive felon called, perfectly, Mr. Rich.
James Higgins is an adjunct fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.
