-Caveat Lector-
National Review
Inside the Pardon Probe
Byron York
Jack Quinn gets ready to tell his story.
February 7, 2001 12:00 p.m.
Other than Bill Clinton himself, the person who has taken the
most flak for the pardon of fugitive tax-evader Marc Rich is Jack
Quinn, the former White House counsel who is now Rich's lawyer.
Quinn will no doubt face more criticism when he appears before
chairman Dan Burton's House Government Reform Committee on
Thursday. But it now appears likely that the most damaging
accusations will be directed not at Quinn but at Eric Holder, the
former deputy attorney general who has tried to downplay his role
in the deal.
Quinn has made an all-out effort to make the best possible
impression before the committee. He has hired the Republican
husband-and-wife team of Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing —
Burton's personal lawyers — to represent him. He's also retained
the services of David Bossie, a former top investigator with the
committee (and a man who had many run-ins with the White House
counsel's office during the Clinton years).
Quinn's main defense: Think what you will about the merits of
Rich's case, but I was just a lawyer doing my job. "Jack Quinn
did what a good lawyer is supposed to do, which is vigorously
represent your client," diGenova says. "Lawyers represent people
that people don't like all the time. They have to do that." The
unspoken part of the argument: I didn't grant a pardon to anybody
— they did.
Quinn's testimony will demolish any notion that Holder was
somehow blind-sided or out of the loop on the Rich deal. Quinn
plans to tell the committee that his contacts with Holder on the
subject of Rich go back farther than has previously been
reported. According to diGenova, Quinn and Holder discussed Rich
as early as October 1999. The discussion was not about a pardon
but rather Rich's desire to settle the case. Quinn also
approached federal prosecutors in New York with Rich's settlement
request, but they refused to deal with him while he was a
fugitive. He would have to come home before any negotiations
could take place.
That was a risk Rich was not prepared to take. So Quinn, in
addition to keeping in touch with the New York prosecutors,
worked on Holder in an attempt to persuade Justice Department
headquarters in Washington to pressure New York to make a deal.
Quinn and Rich bombarded the Justice Department with legal
arguments, analyses, and tax studies. But the prosecutors in New
York would not budge, and Washington did not overrule them. In
February 2000, the New York office gave Rich a final thumbs-down.
Still, Rich didn't give up. According to diGenova, Quinn and
Holder talked in February and again in March in an effort to find
some way to resolve the situation. Those talks ended with no
action, and that is where the matter stood until November 2000,
when Quinn told Holder about the pardon plan. At that point,
Quinn maintains, he kept everybody informed of what was going on.
"When the record is laid out fully," diGenova says, "it will show
that Jack Quinn was in communication with the Department of
Justice, was in communication with the White House, and that he
urged both the White House and the Department of Justice to
communicate with one another."
There is some evidence that Quinn's story will get a relatively
friendly reception on Capitol Hill. "It's obvious from the
documents Quinn turned over that he had established some sort of
communication with Holder regarding the Rich pardon," says one
congressional insider. "It's pretty obvious that Holder was in
the loop." The Burton committee, this insider predicts, will ask
Quinn tough questions for a while before finally concluding that
he was just a lawyer doing his job. Holder will be another
story; the accusation will be that he didn't do his job, which
was to guard the integrity of the process.
That is not to say that Quinn — who notoriously stonewalled the
committee during his days in the White House — is now a good guy.
"Jack Quinn is the whore here," says a well-connected Republican,
in an indelicate expression of an opinion that is shared by
others both inside and outside the GOP hierarchy. "The johns and
the pimps are Bill Clinton and Eric Holder, and I don't blame the
whore for the sins of the johns and pimps."
Although that's not a sound bite you'll hear at the hearings, it
does suggest that Holder's standing among Republicans is
considerably worse than Quinn's. Over the last several years,
the deputy attorney general was in the middle of several bitter
battles between the committee and the Justice Department, most
notably over the campaign-finance scandal. It is not an
exaggeration to say that there was no trust — or love lost —
between the two institutions during the time Holder and his boss
Janet Reno were in power.
There is also a personal dimension to the Department's relations
with Burton. In 1997, at the height of the campaign-fundraising
controversy, when Burton was trying to prod Reno into conducting
an aggressive investigation, the Department announced that it was
instead investigating Burton himself. A Democrat who worked as a
lobbyist for the government of Pakistan accused Burton of trying
to shake him down for campaign contributions, and even though
there was no evidence to support the charge, the Justice
Department began a formal probe (Burton hired diGenova and
Toensing to defend him). The news gave White House spinners the
opportunity to deride Burton's campaign-finance investigation as
tainted. Now, though it is widely believed that the Pakistan
matter is long dead, Burton has never been formally notified that
it is closed. If he were so inclined — and aides say he is not —
Burton might easily hold such treatment against Holder.
"There's no animus," one aide says of Burton's feelings about
Holder. "If it exists, he [Burton] is a master of hiding it."
Whatever the case, Burton is back on the job — again trying to
pry information from Clinton administration officials. Past
attempts nearly always resulted in frustration, but now there is
one very different — and for Republicans, welcome — factor at
work: This time, there's no White House war room. "If this had
been six months ago, there would have been an organized,
orchestrated, PR attack against the chairman, against the
committee, and against any Democrats who dared to speak their
minds," says the congressional insider. "Now, Lanny Davis is no
longer getting the talking points, because nobody's writing
them." And that will make life difficult for anyone who still
feels the need to defend Bill Clinton or Janet Reno or Eric
Holder or anyone else involved in the pardon scandal.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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