Here's one about a lady caught in the federal web for being nice to Hillary-
pantagraph.com
Friday, August 25, 2000
FEATHERED, THEN TARRED: Peg's asking Bill Clinton's pardon
For Peg Bargon, it all began about six years ago, as a simple act of kindness and a favor to a Democratic Party official and longtime friend who wanted to give Hillary Clinton something memorable for a visit the first lady was about to make to Central Illinois.
Positives first.
It was, in fact, memorable.
Negatives next.
Peg has now spent well more than $10,000 in legal fees.
She's been fined $1,200.
She's quit her job.
She's pleaded guilty to federal charges, after a full-scale probe by authorities.
She's been so monitored and so shadowed that, while on probation for her heinous, nefarious crime streak of gift-giving and kindness doling, if she strayed as far away on the world map as -- say -- Effingham from her Piatt County home just outside of Monticello, she first had to report it.
She's been the subject of testimony at a congressional hearing.
She's been refused jobs, credit and applications for grants for a not-for-profit organization to which she belongs because of that one line on forms that reads: "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?"
"It is like I have a scarlet 'A,' " she jokes while being fully serious.
Now, she is embarking on a quest for the ultimate -- a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton, who happens to be the husband of the woman who received her gift.
YES, IN ONLY six years, Peg Bargon's life has gone from the comforting calm of middle America -- living in a beautiful little two-story farmhouse in an outstretch of rolling Piatt County not far from storied Allerton Park -- to sounding more like a Clive Cussler novel or Hollywood espionage drama starring Harrison Ford.
But this would have to be a comedy.
Because it's all over ... umm, please, now be seated ...
... a bird feather.
"I've just kept saying, through it all, 'This can't be happening, this can't be happening,' " says Peg.
One other thing. It can be happening.
And is.
Maybe you remember the beginning of Peg's innocent little folly.
That's how most horror stories start.
Talented at making crafts, she was the woman back in 1994 asked by the then-Democratic Party chairman of Piatt County if she'd make one of her "dream catchers" -- a decorative hoop of feathers, stones and beads that Indian lore claims ward off bad dreams -- so it could be given to Mrs. Clinton, who was about to visit nearby Champaign-Urbana.
Ward off a bad dream?
Uh, wrong verb set. It only welcomed a massive nightmare.
Shortly after presentation to the first lady, federal agents, armed with search warrants, scoured Peg's home in a three-hour "raid" -- to announce her use of a feather (her then 5-year-old son had picked up off the ground an eagle feather years earlier at a South Carolina zoo, thinking it was, as he later would testify, "pretty") was, in fact, a violation of little-known migratory bird laws and she was now under arrest for mere possession.
"Pardon?" asked Peg.
She was booked, fingerprinted, underwent polygraph tests.
She was grilled by feds who launched an exhaustive, expensive probe that included even sending her feather to government labs in Oregon to determine the sex of the bird.
APPARENTLY TIPPED off to a possible large-scale bird-poaching operation in the middle of Illinois countryside, all government officials ultimately found was a dying Piatt County official (the county's Democratic Party chairman died of cancer shortly after he gave Mrs. Clinton her "gift") who needed something to give a first lady and Peg, a nice lady and lifelong Piatt County resident who did craft work.
"I guess what bugs me the most," she says, now at age 44, "is why they just didn't knock at my door and say, 'Lady, do you realize what you're doing is actually illegal?' and just fine me."
Instead, they made a federal case out of it, not to mention a media sensation.
She's been featured in Newsweek. In The Economist, too. And Harper's. Her story made the front page of USA Today. She was a talking-point for Rush Limbaugh. She's been on CNN, the BBC and NPR. With CBS' Bill Geist showing up at her doorstep one day, she was a subject of Dan Rather's "Eye On America" feature.
But in the wake of publicity and pleading guilty at the advice of her attorney -- Champaign's high-powered J. Steven Beckett -- to avoid felony charges and a room at a federal penitentiary, a cloud of sorts has lingered.
"You can't imagine," says Peg, "how something like this can disrupt an otherwise nice life."
Financial duress. Festering anger. Marital stress. Added burdens for Peg and husband, Steve, to raising their two boys, now 13 and 9.
So Peg has decided to take back her own life. Or, at least, try.
With Beckett's aid, she is seeking a pardon from the president of the United States.
They will file it in November, on the fifth anniversary of her conviction.
"I'm just too young," she says, "to allow the rest of my life to be affected this way."
Keep in mind, a pardon will not erase her deed but will, like Richard Nixon back in the yonder days of Watergate, effectively "forgive" her.
"This case," says Beckett, "cries out for that kind of justice. It's time the disability that follows Peg be put out of the way. Peg deserves to be 'Nixonized.' "
THE MINIMUM application for a pardon is 15 pages of bureaucratic forms and statements, but hers -- which spreads all over her home's living room -- is close to 300 pages.
Through Beckett, her request first will go to the U.S. pardon attorney's office in Washington, D.C., where a probe will be launched into Peg's background -- as if it hasn't been done enough.
If she passes there, her request then will move on to the deputy attorney general's office.
If approved there, it goes to the office of the White House counsel.
If lawyers there believe Peg's case warrants presidential attention, it migrates -- sort of like a bird feather -- into the Oval Office, where he will have 30 days to grant or revoke a case.
"This is," says Beckett, humorously echoing his own five-word statement that made the national news back in 1995, "a dumb case." He adds: "But it certainly deserves the president's attention ... to end it."
It also will spawn irony if Clinton himself is in need of a pardon, from his successor, as a result of his own much-publicized misadventures.
As for Peg Bargon and that "dream catcher" back in 1994?
As Beckett puts it, it's been a dream snatcher, for everyone involved, since.
And those migratory bird laws?
They were created, of course, to protect "innocent animals" and insulate them from unnecessary torment and harm.
If only Peg were so lucky. |
