BUDD: If Bill Clinton was hoping to move out of the White House and into a scandalfree life, we have just three words for the former President: No such luck. Yesterday, outrage over his decision to pardon financier Mark Rich turned into a criminal investigation. The pardon has been criticized because Mr. Rich's ex-wife donated hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars, to several of Mr. Clinton's pet projects. Now U.S. Attorney Mary Joe White says she wants to know whether anyone tried to actually buy Mr. Rich's pardon. BUDD: Joe Connison has followed the President through all of his troubles. He's the author of "The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton." We reached him in New York City.
FINLAY: Mr. Connison, how much trouble is Mr. Clinton in over this pardon?
CONNISON: Oh, I think he's in sort of bad public relations trouble, but I doubt that he's in any real legal jeopardy. FINLAY: What would be the criminal act here?
CONNISON: Well, the theory of the criminal act I guess would be that somehow Mark Rich or his ex-wife Denise Rich paid the President to pardon him, but there's really no evidence of that. The campaign for the pardon didn't begin until last fall, and the payments that have been brought up - donations, I guess, from Denise Rich - almost all of them happened considerably before that, including the money given to the Clinton library and her political donations. She had a long history of giving to the Democratic party, but all of that took place before anyone even attempted to get a pardon for Mark Rich.
FINLAY: Given all the trouble he's had with his reputation, what do you suppose the President was thinking of when he decided to go ahead with it? CONNISON: I think what he was probably thinking of was the avalanche of pressure on him from friends of his in Israel, people ranging from the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, who called Clinton twice including the day before he signed the pardon, to the Likud mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Omert [sp], to Abraham Foxman, who's the head of the most prestigious Jewish organization in America, the Anti-Defamation League. All of these people wrote letters to Clinton or called him asking him to pardon Mark Rich, and I think if you put the Rich pardon in the context of the MidEast peace negotiations that Clinton was so intensely involved in during that whole period, then it starts to make a little more sense. It doesn't mean it was the right thing to do, but it suggests a better reason for him to have done this, in his mind, than returning a favour to Denise Rich. FINLAY: What? He would want to pardon somebody who - CONNISON: Well, he - FINLAY: - is charged with all kinds of tax evasion and huge amounts of money because he wanted the Likud to be helpful in the Middle East? CONNISON: No. No, no. Because he wanted to please people who had worked very closely with him, like Barak and Shimon Perez, the former Prime Minister, and a wide, wide range of people in Israel who had been working with Clinton in the peace process.
FINLAY: What was their interest in having Mr. Rich pardoned?
CONNISON: Well, you'd have to look at the letters that they sent, which I've read. They talk about his humanitarian help. The former head of the Israel Intelligence service wrote a letter to Clinton claiming that Rich was very helpful in helping Jews get out of countries like Iraq and Iran where he had business dealings. So he had given hundreds of millions of dollars to various charities and institutions, and I think this was an expression of gratitude from a lot of these people.
CONNISON: And if you look at the context of the peace process, Clinton at the time was pushing Barak very hard to make concessions to the Palestinians which he ultimately did make, and at the same time Barak was asking Clinton for two things. They had requested, as the Israeli government has done many times, the release of Jonathan Pollard, the American spy for Israel who's serving a life sentence. FINLAY: Who was not pardoned.
CONNISON: Who was not pardoned and who is not going to be pardoned, and Mark Rich. Here's Clinton, a lame-duck executive, seeking a lot of co-operation from a government in Israel that's under its own political pressures, and I think he may well have asked himself What can I do for Barak? And when Barak finally called him the second time, I think that may have had a lot of weight with him.
FINLAY: Okay. Now, back to Mary Joe White, the prosecutor who has asked to open a criminal investigation. Did she have to get permission from the Justice Department to do this?
CONNISON: Ordinarily, an investigation of this magnitude is cleared at the highest level of the Justice Department, that's right. FINLAY: So President Bush and company notwithstanding, talking about their distaste for opening any further investigations, it was the Attorney General who must have said Go ahead?
CONNISON: Well, he suggested the other day, Ashcroft, that this was okay with him, - FINLAY: M'hm. CONNISON: - that he thought this ought to be investigated, and he at first was saying that he would be perfectly happy with giving immunity to Denise Rich so that she could testify in Congress about this whole matter.
FINLAY: So President Bush - CONNISON: He changed his mind. FINLAY: Yes.
CONNISON: But in fairness, I think it would have been difficult for them to say no to Mary Joe White if she came to them and said, "Look, I want to investigate possible criminal wrong-doing by Mark Rich or Denise Rich involving this pardon." I think it would have been tough for the Attorney General or anybody else to say, "No, don't investigate." I happen to be of the opinion that there's not much of a foundation for an investigation here, but she may find something that involves Mark Rich certainly. FINLAY: Now, there are all kinds of people who've been after President Clinton for a long time, as you've written. What is her motivation here, though, do you think? Is it political or - CONNISON: The U.S. Attorney?
FINLAY: Yes, Mary Joe White, or - CONNISON: Well, I don't want to speculate about her motivation. I think there have been expressions of her anger leaked out from her office, that she was angry not to have been consulted about this pardon when it's her office that was in charge of the Rich case for the last 17 years. She wasn't there the whole time, but certainly she's been there for almost half of that period. And she may be looking for a way to either punish the President for what he did, or she may think that there's another way to make a criminal case against Rich now, after the pardon, and I think all those are possible. FINLAY: So is this going to be a wildly disruptive event now in his life?
CONNISON: In Clinton's life? FINLAY: Yes.
CONNISON: I doubt it. Compared to everything that's happened before, it's kind of a walk in the park. I mean, I don't think that he has any criminal culpability here. I think it would be very difficult for them to show - I think it would be probably impossible for them to show that he had sold the pardon to Mark Rich, and therefore I think, once the evidence is all put on the record, it's going to go away pretty quickly. FINLAY: So whether it was a criminal act or just a questionable one, though, is it going to affect again his ability to raise funds for the Democratic party?
CONNISON: Oh, I guess it might in the short term, but he's pretty resourceful. He usually bounces back. I think, as usual, that his enemies have oversold their story here.
FINLAY: M'hm. CONNISON: They've gone a little - they would have been wiser to just say, "Boy, what a dumb thing Bill Clinton did, and he let this crook go." Instead they've turned it into this whole conspiracy theory of bribery and so forth that they're not going to be able to prove, and as usual it's going to look like - FINLAY: A witch hunt. CONNISON: - they've dug themselves another big, dry hole here. FINLAY: All right, Mr. Connison. Thank you very much.
CONNISON: Thank you.
FINLAY: Nice to talk to you.
CONNISON: Sure.
FINLAY: Bye.
CONNISON: Bye.
BUDD: Joe Connison is an author and political columnist for the New York Observer, and we reached him in New York.
