'Very good reasons' for Marc Rich's pardon?

[Carl Remick]

[The following is from Gail Collins' column in yesterday's NY Times.  If 
anyone finds these "very good reasons" for Rich's pardon, please forward 
them to the U.S. Justice Dept., which would like to know.]

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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