LATimes Clinton Pardons: Ego Fed a Numbers Game

Clemency: A desire to add to his legacy, coupled with a flood of last-minute pleas from every corner, overwhelmed the system.

By STEPHEN BRAUN, RICHARD A. SERRANO, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON--Driven to prove himself as compassionate as his predecessors, Bill Clinton oversaw an unruly avalanche of clemency requests that too often bypassed normal channels and was sometimes steered toward him by relatives and intimates, say aides and others involved in the process. In the final months of his presidency, Clinton was open about his unhappiness with his clemency numbers. Stacked against the number of clemencies granted by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Clinton felt his then-274 was far too low. He wanted to go out looking magnanimous, he told aides. In addition, one aide recalled, Clinton was worried that "meritorious cases," particularly those of low-level drug offenders languishing in prison with harsh sentences, "weren't getting to his attention." But by pushing to boost his numbers, minimizing the role of the Justice Department and opening himself up to advice from strangers, Washington figures and relatives, Clinton helped turn what he had planned as a dignified issuance of mercy into a disorderly rush. His last-minute decisions on many pardons have spawned a spate of investigations and threaten to set the final tarnished image of his presidency. Until now, congressional leaders and other critics have suggested that influence peddling, campaign contributions and electoral politics are behind Clinton's pardon of fugitive commodities broker Marc Rich and some of the other 175 clemencies he granted on his last day in office. But former White House aides, Justice Department officials and others close to the process depict the controversial clemencies instead as the products of an overwhelmed and leaky system hobbled by human failure. In the final days, clemency requests appeared to come from every direction--from outside petitioners who saw their last, best chance for freedom slipping away with Clinton's presidency, from Justice Department professionals ordered to resurrect dead files, and from relatives and intimates who knew exactly how to approach a president eager to burnish his legacy. It is ironic now, but White House aides tried desperately to protect Clinton from the hard-edged political considerations that could distort such a human process. But they failed, they say now, because too many cases were shoveled before too few White House and Justice Department lawyers in too short a time. And in the rush, members of Congress, prosecutors, religious leaders, White House staffers, Washington lobbyists such as Jack Quinn and relatives Hugh Rodham and Roger Clinton all found ways to float clemency cases before the president and his staff. One former White House official pinned the blame squarely on Clinton and those on his staff who catered to him. By the end of his term, the official said, Clinton had "no one around him strong enough to say no." "He was surrounded by enablers," the former official said. "There was no one there to stop him from making mistakes like this." According to those closest to the process and who spoke only on condition of anonymity, things began to change before the November election. That is when the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, which receives and vets clemency applications before making recommendations to the White House, was told in no uncertain terms that the president wanted more cases "in the pipeline to review," one former official said. After the election, say those familiar with the process, the White House opened the floodgates to pardon and commutation applications. In December, nearly three dozen clemencies that Clinton had denied earlier were suddenly given new life. "The White House was yelling and screaming for more cases," said Margaret Love, the pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. "But at Justice," said Love, who remains familiar with the Clinton clemency process, "they didn't have anything more to give to the president. So the White House told Justice to go find some more cases, to search around in old [clemency] files. "So, they just gave them a list of 30 or more cases that had already been denied [by Clinton] so that they [the White House] could pad their numbers." Just over a month later, said Love and others who are familiar with the process, Clinton approved 14 of those previously denied clemency applications. In his desire to look merciful, the president had overruled himself. At the same time that the White House was requesting additional clemency applications from the Justice Department, clemency-related calls and letters to the White House surged--not only from the usual candidates hoping for action from a lame-duck president but also from partisan Democrats fearing that they had little clemency hopes from a Republican president. One top aide said he fielded at least 20 phone requests on clemency each week. Another, former senior White House aide Maria Echaveste, said she too fielded many calls, including some on behalf of a Native American activist and convicted murderer, Leonard Peltier--whose application was denied--and several from Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), who wanted to check on the case of Los Angeles cocaine dealer Carlos Vignali. Echaveste said she referred all calls to the White House counsel's office rather than the Justice Department. "People knew the president was leaving," she said. Even Clinton's former press spokesman, Jake Siewert, found himself juggling applications. "People would read my name in the paper and send things in." A few trusted deputies, headed by White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, were assigned to deal with clemency matters. As the calls and letters streamed in from late November through mid-January, White House Counsel Beth Nolan and Bruce Lindsey, a Clinton intimate and trouble-shooter, were supposed to ensure that naked political considerations were vetted before applications reached Clinton's desk. "We figured we had a system in place to make sure there were no special pleadings," one staffer said. "But by the end, [we] were all terribly overworked." There was also growing friction with the Justice Department's pardon attorneys. "The counsel's office felt that Justice was too severe in some cases where it recommended denial," a former Clinton official said. Impatient with the pace of the Justice Department's reviews, White House officials began accepting clemency applications that had bypassed the department altogether. Clinton approved at least 26 such applications. Former aides said that number was justified because many of them were cases Clinton already was familiar with, such as those of Henry G. Cisneros, a former Housing and Urban Development secretary, and Whitewater defendant Susan McDougal. But others would later explode like buried land mines. In addition to the Rich pardon, currently under investigation by two congressional committees and the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, there was the case of Almon Glenn Braswell. An herbal-remedy marketer pardoned by Clinton for his 1983 conviction on mail fraud and perjury charges, Braswell now is the target of a criminal tax-evasion and money-laundering investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles. An undisclosed number of clemencies were granted over the Justice Department's recommendation of a denial. One such case was the prison commutation of Vignali, granted by Clinton after Vignali's father, Horacio Vignali, paid Rodham $200,000 in legal fees and urged a host of Southern California leaders and elected officials to write letters and make phone calls on his behalf. The former president said last week that he was unaware either of his brother-in-law's lobbying for Vignali and Braswell, who also paid Rodham $200,000, or the payments he received. Rodham said he returned the money at Clinton's behest. The extent of Rodham's work for Vignali and Braswell remains unclear. But two officials and other sources said Rodham personally telephoned White House officials and helped coordinate the campaign of letters and telephone calls that barraged the White House in the final weeks before Vignali was released from prison after serving six years of a 15-year sentence. Another individual familiar with Vignali's case said that some of the last-minute letters from Los Angeles leaders written on his behalf were supposed to have been sent to Rodham's office for review. Although one former White House official insisted that the last-minute clemency process was "not as chaotic as it might seem," the official conceded that "with all those pressures bearing down on so few people, inevitably people seeking access are going to get through." And access, former Clinton aides now say resignedly, could simply not be denied to relatives like Rodham and Roger Clinton. Rodham had long had near-unfettered access to the White House, former Clinton aides now say. His penchant for broaching "half-baked" policy, business and legal notions "always made our alarms go off when he was around," one top official said. "It wasn't unusual for Hugh to recommend things," one aide said. "You'd just pocket it. You wouldn't want to bring it up with the president because it was usually inappropriate." But as Clinton neared the end of his presidency, he spent more and more time with Rodham and his own half-brother, Roger. "It was family time," an aide said. They were a regular threesome for golf outings, former aides said, hitting the links at Camp David, Md., around Thanksgiving and then just after Christmas. "The president enjoyed Hugh's company," an aide said. "That's the kind of access we couldn't do a thing about." Staffers were equally unable to rein in Roger Clinton. In an interview with The Times on Friday, Roger Clinton described the ease with which he slipped a list of six pardon prospects to the president in late December. "I put it into a stack of papers on a table in the White House where he would see it," Roger Clinton said. It was the sort of familiar access, one former Clinton aide said, "that none of us could stop, no matter how senior we were, no matter how much we wanted to. When it comes to family, you just have to hope for the best."

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001