NYPost

ROGER SENT PARDON-BID LETTERS TO WHITE HOUSE

By DEBORAH ORIN

June 30, 2001 -- WASHINGTON - Documents from the Clinton White House show Roger Clinton interceded to try to win presidential pardons for some of the latest names on his rogues' gallery of pals, sources have told The Post.

Congressional probers said files from the Clinton White House counsel's office, subpoenaed from the National Archives, include letters that Roger apparently forwarded seeking pardons.

"They say something like, 'Dear Roger, it's your old pal so-and-so. I'm trying to get a pardon. Please help me,'" a source said.

It is unclear whether the White House counsel's office took any action to follow up, added the source, who declined to identify the names except to say they are in addition to Rosario Gambino.

It was reported this week that the Clinton White House considered a pardon for Gambino, a convicted heroin trafficker and alleged mobster, after his kids paid Roger $50,000.

Roger's lawyer, Bart Williams, has confirmed he got $50,000 from Gambino's family, but denies it was for a presidential pardon. He refuses to say what it was for.

Investigators from a House committee this week asked Roger Clinton about any pardon-pleading he did for several other crooks, including a Kentucky horse breeder jailed for fraud, a developer locked up for kickbacks, a tax-cheating marina owner and a man doing time on gun and drug charges.

His lawyer has denied Roger Clinton got paid by any of those crooks - none of whom received pardons - but refuses to say if he sought pardons for them. He acknowledges Roger knows all but one either directly or "he knows people who know them."

Congressional probers are also seeking bank records to check whether $250,000 in mysterious traveler's checks were indeed, as Roger's lawyer claims, payments for rock concerts in places like Kazakhstan, North Korea, South Korea, Russia and Japan.

The investigators are trying to obtain customs documents to see if the traveler's checks, reportedly purchased in Taiwan and Venezuela and double-signed by Roger, were declared on his customs forms.

Roger Clinton's lawyer, who didn't return calls yesterday, previously told The Post that the unusual payments were for "large-arena type audiences . . . no kidding."

News reports show Roger performed in communist North Korea, one of the world's most totalitarian states, in December 1999 and laid flowers at the tomb of the country's late Stalinist leader, Kim Il-Sung.

The ex-president's brother also made two trips to the ex-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan in 1999, in the middle of that country's elections, as the ruling party's guest.

At home, Roger Clinton's gigs have been roundly panned - "As bad as the singing was, however, it was nothing compared with the curly-headed, lantern-jawed performer's attempt at dancing," The Washington Post wrote in 1994.

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001

Answers

[I refuse to sign up for a NYTimes subscription so can only offer this bit, but it seems to contain the important stuff.]

In the last weeks of the Clinton presidency, when Roger Clinton was visiting the White House for a few days, a piece of mail arrived addressed to him from the family of a convicted drug dealer looking for clemency. The president made a note on the envelope to Meredith Cabe, a White House lawyer who was handling hundreds of last-minute pardons. "Meredith, looks like a case for commutation pls check out — BC," the note reads, said a lawyer who has seen the document. It is not clear what role Roger Clinton played in moving the application of the convicted drug dealer, Steven Michael Griggs, to the head of the line, and Mr. Griggs did not receive a presidential pardon. But the document provides the first evidence that President Bill Clinton lent his support to any of his half brother's efforts to secure pardons for felons convicted of drug dealing, bank fraud and tax evasion.

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001

-- Anonymous, July 01, 2001