President-elect Joe Biden’s Homeland Security secretary pick will likely face questions during a Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday over an appeal he made to help secure a controversial sentence commutation for a convicted drug dealer whose father was a major Democratic Party donor.
A former U.S. attorney, Alejandro Mayorkas, approached the White House in late 2000 under President Bill Clinton on behalf of Carlos Vignali, a convicted drug trafficker who prosecutors said was a lead figure in a drug ring with nearly three dozen members that stretched from California to Minnesota.
Federal prosecutors opposed a commutation. Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Josh Hawley of Missouri are expected to query Mayorkas about his appeal to Clinton.
Vignali’s father, Horacio, an affluent real estate developer and major donor to California Democrats, leveled a six-year campaign to free his son, persuading nine or more important political figures to petition the White House on his son’s behalf.
Horacio Vignali upped his political contributions at the start of his son’s trial, giving increasingly larger amounts, including the Democratic National Committee during their national convention in Los Angeles.
The elder Vignali also gave to then-Democratic Party Rep. Xavier Becerra of Los Angeles, who Biden recently nominated to lead his Department of Health and Human Services. Asked about these donations, he responded, “I’m a Democrat.”
The U.S. attorney in Minnesota, whose office won Vignali’s conviction, Todd Jones, said Mayorkas called him in early 1999 to ask about Vignali’s role.
Jones said Mayorkas called him as he was preparing to issue a letter to the pardon attorney’s office opposing Vignali’s commutation.
“He was checking up on what the case was all about,” Jones said of Mayorkas. Jones said he told Mayorkas that Vignali was a “major player” in the trafficking case.
“There was a lot of influence, oh yes,” said Andrew Dunne, an assistant U.S. attorney in Minneapolis who prosecuted Vignali’s case. Dunne later advised the Justice Department against commuting the sentence.
Clinton freed Vignali after serving less than six years of a more than 14-year sentence, commuting his sentence on his final day in office.
Clinton aides said that the president was persuaded by the Hispanic community’s appeals and pointed to Mayorkas and Los Angeles’s then-cardinal. Becerra also asked the White House to review the case carefully.
Another high-profile supporter was Clinton’s brother-in-law Hugh Rodham, who was paid more than $200,000 to advocate for Vignali.
Vignali’s clemency appeal was one of 140 pardons and 36 commutations granted by Clinton on his way out of office, including for fugitive financier Mark Rich, stoking outcry.
Mayorkas is one of Biden’s first Cabinet nominees to appear before the Senate but has testified before lawmakers before when he served under President Barack Obama.
Mayorkas called the request “a mistake” during his 2009 hearing for director of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Becerra later said that he relied on information from the Justice Department to inform his appeal.
He later served as deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama and was the highest-ranking Cuban American in the administration.
During his hearing to be the No. 2 official at DHS, lawmakers probed Mayorkas for his role in a company run by the brother of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to secure an investor visa after the application was denied and an appeal rejected.
A 2015 inspector general report said Mayorkas intervened in a slew of applications with ties to prominent Democrats, including cases tied to Rodham, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
In 1998, Mayorkas was nominated by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and appointed by Clinton as the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, becoming the youngest U.S. attorney.
If confirmed, he will return to DHS after a stint in the private sector, where ethics filings show he made more than $3.3 million over the last two years advising and representing legal clients including Uber, Northrop Grumman, Airbnb, Intuit, and T-Mobile.
