Worst of all [among Clinton's last-minute pardons], you had Marc Rich, the billionaire who was indicted in 1983 for more than 50 counts of wire fraud, racketeering, tax evasion and trading with the enemy. Ever since then, the aptly named Mr. Rich has been living large in tiny Switzerland, resisting extradition and sending signals that he was willing to cough up any amount of money to make the case go away as long as he was assured he would not have to spend a single day in prison.
"Every U.S. attorney since then has told him he had to come back first, and then we would talk," said Morris Weinberg, a Florida attorney who was a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney's office in New York at the time that Mr. Rich was indicted.
In a press conference at a Chappaqua deli on Sunday, Mr. Clinton claimed that he had given considerable thought to the Rich pardon, although apparently none of it involved asking the opinion of the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, where prosecutors have been in shell shock since they heard about the deal after the fact.
Having said there were "very good reasons" to pardon Mr. Rich, Mr. Clinton quickly ... [suggested] that reporters get the details from Jack Quinn, Al Gore's former chief of staff, who is now working as Mr. Rich's attorney. But since Mr. Quinn was not in the deli in Chappaqua, nobody got to hear his excellent arguments.
[Full text at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/23/opinion/23COLL.html]
Carl
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