NewsMax.com
Thursday, March 1, 2001

The House of Representatives Government Reform Committee is attempting to discover whether there is a correlation between who gave money and who got pardons by Clinton.

For a while it appeared as though the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation, which raises money for the library to be built in Little Rock, Ark., was going to stonewall all requests by the committee, chaired by Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., to see the names of its contributors.

But earlier this week, attorneys for the committee and for the foundation agreed that Burton and other senior committee members could examine the donor list, while protecting the privacy of contributors not relevant to the investigation.

As a result, investigators spent nearly an hour Wednesday going over the identities of 150 donors who had given more than $5,000.

According to a report by the Associated Press:

Committee lawyers would disclose no information about the contributors or if any of the names warrant further investigation.

At the same time, the library foundation is making available a list of donors in response to a subpoena from United States Attorney Mary Jo White in New York, who is conducting a grand-jury criminal investigation into the Clinton clemencies.

Both the federal prosecutor and the House committee want to know whether Clinton's pardon of fugitive billionaire Marc Rich was prompted by contributions to the library.

Shortly before Rich was indicted in 1983 on charges of tax evasion, fraud and making illegal "trading with the enemy" oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis, he fled to Switzerland.

His ex-wife, Denise, contributed $450,000 to the foundation, $1.1 million to the Democratic Party and at least $109,000 to Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign for the Senate.

Denise Rich and her friend, Beth Dozoretz, a former finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee who pledged to raise $1 million for the library project, have refused to testify before the committee.

In a related development, a Justice Department lawyer testified to the committee Wednesday that Clinton had assumed personal control of the clemency process very early in his presidency.

Margaret Colgate Love, the Justice Department's pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, said Clinton quickly took away the department's traditional role as the first to review pardon requests.

"The final Clinton pardons were an accident waiting to happen," she testified.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Pardongate
Clinton Scandals

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