For a handful of remaining stalwarts, the pardons are nothing. Next year, if security cameras capture Bill Clinton robbing a bank with a sawed-off shotgun, James Carville will no doubt go on Hardball, just as he did earlier this month, and call him “the best president we’ve ever had.” Joe Lockhart will tell Larry King that Clinton’s decision to rob the bank was made purely “on the merits,” which decision is being misrepresented so as “to inflict political damage on the former president and on the Democrats as a whole.” Poor John Podesta will subject himself to another 15-minute Meet the Press humiliation: “Well, I think that the — Tim, the truth is that over the course of that time, it was sort of a — you know, we were — we had to — it was under consideration,” this bank-heist thing, but lookit, can’t we please talk about “medical privacy” legislation instead?
And Lanny “Fido” Davis, ever vainly attempting to retrieve his master’s frisbee reputation, will tell CNN that the former president deserves credit for not robbing two banks. American Indian “activist” Leonard Peltier had also applied for presidential clemency, Davis has lately reminded us. But Peltier, who shot two FBI agents as they knelt before him, already wounded, and begged for their lives, was actually refused a pardon by Clinton — such is the awesome spine of our 42nd president. Why, Davis wonders indignantly, are so few people commenting on that?
He has a point. A few short months ago, after all, half the college-educated world would have respectfully echoed Lanny’s little yips and yowls. But continued Democratic control of the White House is no longer at issue — nothing practical any longer depends on Bill Clinton’s image, that is — and unvarnished truth is suddenly back in fashion. Our leading editorial pages, for example, now proudly announce their discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun: The pardons, they declare on an almost daily basis, are “emblematic of a consistent contempt for the office of which Mr. Clinton was temporary steward.” Friends of Bill complain to the New York tabloids that he has — sacrebleu! — lied to them. Jimmy Carter calls his fellow ex-president “disgraceful.” And the disgraceful man’s own cabinet appointees hiss that “he’s on his own” from now on, for they have come to regard him with “total disgust.” Imagine.
Bill Clinton is almost alone. In “a half-furnished Dutch Colonial in New York,” attended only by the “former White House valet named Oscar” who brings him fresh cans of Diet Coke, our retired president spends his days on the phone, Time magazine reports, “calling to justify himself to his friends.” It’s all about “setups” and “overzealous prosecutors” and “unfair legal cases that never should have gone to indictment,” sighs one person who recently received such a harangue. “You get tired of listening to it.” Or you decline to listen to it altogether: “David Geffen will barely talk to me!” a despairing Clinton has been heard to moan — and this because Leonard Peltier didn’t get a pardon.
Except that in this last particular, as in every other, the president’s fickle pals rather too easily exempt themselves from blame. Is it entirely Clinton’s fault that Leonard Peltier remains locked up? It is not. David Geffen is a billionaire. He should have bought the cop-killer a better connected lawyer. Which is pretty much all it took, as a careful reading of last week’s news stories, each one better than the last, suggests.
In the early 1990s, Manhattan attorney Harvey “The Wing” Weinig codirected a $ 19-million money-laundering operation for Colombia’s Cali cocaine cartel. At his trial, federal prosecutors played tape recordings of Weinig boasting of his participation in a kidnapping and extortion plot — and scheming to steal a fortune from his drug-lord employers: “F — k’em! F — k’em! I’m taking a million dollars and let’s see [them] get it from me!” Early last year, about a third of the way through his resulting prison sentence, The Wing secured the services of defense attorney Reid Weingarten, already familiar to the White House through his helpful representation of such Clinton-ambit sleazeballs as Charlie Trie, Teamsters ex-president Ron Carey, Pauline Kanchanalak, and Mike Espy. And Weingarten, along with former Clinton aide David Dreyer, who is related to Weinig by marriage, then went to work on the West Wing. Two months from now, and over the vehement objections of the Justice Department, Harvey Weinig will go free.
James Manning and Robert Fain are two guys convicted of tax evasion in 1982. They’re both from Arkansas and they both somehow know another man from Arkansas, television producer and presidential sycophant Harry Thomason. Thomason, of course, knows Clinton consigliere Harold Ickes, whom he approached on behalf of Manning and Fain a week or so before Inauguration Day. Ickes shares a legal practice with Hillary Clinton campaign treasurer William Cunningham III, who then drew up the requisite pardon paperwork. After which — and with just days to spare before all the friendly faces there would disappear — another Ickes law partner, Janice Enright, delivered the Manning and Fain petitions to the White House. Presto.
Then there’s Roger Clinton, the former president’s trouble-magnet, ne’er-do-well brother. Roger, Newsweek’s invaluable Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman recently revealed, was last year under serious FBI investigation for having solicited cash payments from various underworld types on promises that he could arrange to have a certain presidential someone wipe clean their criminal records. And Roger, it turns out, did wind up directly appealing to that someone, in the waning days of his administration, for about ten such pardons. Not to worry, advises Julia Payne, spokesman for America’s first family of corruption: Roger says he received no compensation for making these requests. And Bill says he didn’t grant any of them. We are meant to take their word for it, apparently. The president’s January 20 pardon of Mitchell Couey Wood, for the crime of having once procured cocaine — from Roger Clinton? Chalk that up to random chance.
Finally, there is the partially resolved mystery of Carlos Vignali, highlighted in these pages last week. In early January, Vignali was still less than halfway through a 15-year federal sentence for financing a major interstate cocaine trafficking ring. Then a little birdie whispered in his ear. “Word around prison,” Vignali later told his lawyer, “was that it was the right time to approach the president.” And so he did. Whereupon the president — here, too, over vehement objections from the Department of Justice — said okay. This much we learned when the Los Angeles Times reported it on February 11. The question remained, however: Who in the world could have led Vignali to believe that Bill Clinton’s absolution was his for the asking? And how in the world could it have proved to be true?
The answer spilled out last Wednesday: Vignali and a second highly questionable pardonee named Almon Glenn Braswell paid the president’s brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, $ 200,000 apiece to grease their deals during an extended January visit to the White House. Never once while successfully wheedling for these clemencies, Bill Clinton now urges us to understand, did Rodham specifically mention he’d taken any kind of fee — and the money has since been returned. Moreover, Hillary Clinton was an ignorant and therefore innocent bystander throughout the entire affair: “You know, it came as a surprise to me.” And “I did not have any involvement in the pardons that were granted or not granted, you know.” And, “You know, I don’t have any memory at all of ever talking to my brother about this.”
Yes, well, guess what? After eight long years, we think we’re fully entitled to disbelieve such denials — and we suspect that the rest of America, brutally if belatedly disabused of its credulousness about the Clintons, might at last be prepared to share our doubts. For it is surely bad enough what Mrs. Clinton inadvertently admitted at her damage-control press conference last Thursday: “It became apparent around Christmas that people knew that the president was considering pardons.” And the place was subsequently besieged by “many, many people who had an interest, a friend, a relative,” or whatnot. Such “people would hand me envelopes” and “I would just pass them on.” And if her brother Hugh were, “you know, Joe Smith from somewhere who had no connection with me, we wouldn’t be standing here, would we?”
No, indeed, we would not. Because Joe Smith’s clients, with no hope whatever of purchasing the favor of a presidency conducted from start to finish like some medieval court of intrigue, would still be sleeping behind bars.
David Tell, for the Editors
