Mrs. Clinton can keep a straight face while throwing
around charges of "cronyism"? This borders on sociopathy.
All in the Family
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BY JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, July 5, 2007 12:16 p.m. EDT
You almost can't help but grudgingly admire the absolute and total shamelessness of Hillary and Bill Clinton, the former and possibly future first lady. Given Mrs. Clinton's lesser half's troubled history with the pardon power, one would have expected it to be an awkward moment for her when President Bush spared Scooter Libby prison time in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. How would she finesse this one?
By being completely brazen, as it turns out. The Associated Press reports from Keokuk, Iowa, that Mrs. Clinton "drew a distinction" between the Libby commutation--"which she has harshly criticized--and her husband's 140 pardons in his closing hours in office":
<<< Her husband's pardons, issued in the closing hours of his presidency, were simply routine exercise in the use of the pardon power, and none were aimed at protecting the Clinton presidency or legacy, she said. >>>
Earlier, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement saying, "This commutation sends the clear signal that in this Administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice."
But let's go back and review some of Mr. Clinton's pardons. The one everyone remembers is that of Marc Rich, the fugitive tax evader who renounced his citizenship and whose wife was a big Clinton donor. (Coincidentally, Rich was a client of Scooter Libby, then a lawyer in private practice.) But from CNN, here's a contemporaneous list of other 11th-hour pardons:
- Roger Clinton, who was convicted of drug-related charges in the 1980s. He was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty in 1985 to conspiring to distribute cocaine. He cooperated with authorities and testified against other drug defendants.
- Susan McDougal, a former real estate business partner of the Clintons. She was sentenced in 1996 and released from prison in 1998. She was convicted of four felonies related to a fraudulent $300,000 federally backed loan that she and her husband, James McDougal, never repaid. One tenth of the loan amount was placed briefly in the name of Whitewater Development, the Arkansas real estate venture of the Clintons and the McDougals. . . .
- Henry Cisneros, who served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development during Clinton's first term in office. He was convicted of making false statements to FBI agents conducting a background investigation of him when he was nominated to the Cabinet post in 1993. They included misleading investigators about cash payments he made to a former mistress.
- Former CIA Director John Deutch. The one-time spy chief and top Pentagon official was facing criminal charges in connection with his mishandling of national secrets on a home computer.
Among the beneficiaries of Mr. Clinton's pardons, then, were his own brother, a central figure in the Whitewater scandal, and two members of his own cabinet, one of whom, unlike Libby, actually faced charges of mishandling national secrets. Yet Mrs. Clinton can keep a straight face while throwing around charges of "cronyism"? This borders on sociopathy.
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