Bill Clinton was the tightest president since Thomas Jefferson when it came to granting convicts pardons and prison sentence commutations. But all that changed when his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, decided to run for the Senate in 2000 and needed all the help she could get.

According to new details about the Clinton-era “Pardongate,” the last of several scandals that plagued the administration and further sullied the former president’s reputation as he left office, the Democrat pushed for so many pardons to help his wife and cronies that lawyers running the eleventh-hour operation resorted to internet searches to determine the “fitness” of applicants.