Martha Prosecutor Gave Pardongate Pass to Hillary

The U.S. attorney who went after Martha Stewart in what looks to many like a prosecutorial jihad hasn't always been so tough on powerful women.

In fact, just two years before his team nailed Stewart for lying to investigators about insider trading, U.S. Attorney James Comey let Hillary Clinton slide on charges that she traded presidential clemency for votes in the village of New Square, N.Y.

By the time Stewart was convicted on Friday, Comey was long gone from the offices of the U.S. Southern District, having moved up the Justice Department food chain to assume the position of deputy attorney general.

But it was his decision to target Stewart in 2002, using what New York Times columnist William Safire described as "novel legal theories," that now threatens to put thousands of Martha Stewart OmniMedia employees out on the street.

Comey, however, was much more deferential to Mrs. Clinton. When President Clinton commuted the sentences of four New Square rabbis after their village voted 1,200 to 14 for Hillary in her Senate race against Rick Lazio, the ambitious prosecutor concluded that it was all just an amazing coincidence.

Fellow Pardongate target Denise Rich likewise seems to have escaped the Martha treatment, even though Comey's agents turned up reams of evidence suggesting Rich was less than truthful when she told probers that there was no connection between her husband's pardon and the $400,000 she donated to the Clinton Presidential Library.

Editor's note:
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Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Clinton Scandals
Pardongate
Sen. Hillary Clinton