Essay By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Source: The New York Times | March 29, 2001

WASHINGTON. “You never made a mistake in your life?” an angry Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti- Defamation League, shouted over the phone. “What about when you worked for that anti-Semite Nixon?”

JdN: the Jewish columnist for the New York Times,William Safire [photo; winner of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Safire]

This good man, with a record of 36 years fighting for civil rights and against bigotry, was understandably distressed at a judgment parenthetically expressed in my previous column about the need to control the influence of money in politics.

It had just been revealed that Foxman – whose organization had received $250,000 over the years from Marc Rich – had not only written to President Bill Clinton urging forgiveness for the fugitive billionaire but was present at the creation of the pardon plot.

*** Wikipedia on March Rich [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich]

U.S. indictment and controversial pardon[edit]

In 1983 Rich and partner Pincus Green were indicted on 65 criminal counts, including income tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and trading with Iran during the oil embargo (at a time when Iranian revolutionaries were still holding American citizens hostage).^[3][9] The charges would have led to a sentence of more than 300 years in prison had Rich been convicted on all counts.^[3] The indictment was filed by then-U.S. Federal Prosecutor (and future mayor of New York City) Rudolph Giuliani. At the time it was the biggest tax evasion case in U.S. history.^[19]

Hearing of the plans for the indictment, Rich fled^[11] to Switzerland and, always insisting that he was not guilty, never returned to the U.S. to answer the charges.^{[Notes 1]} Rich’s companies eventually pled guilty to 35 counts of tax evasion and paid $90 million in fines,^[9] although Rich himself remained on the Federal Bureau of Investigation‘s Ten Most-Wanted Fugitives List for many years,^[21] narrowly evading capture in Britain, Germany, Finland, and Jamaica.^[22] Fearing arrest, he did not even return to the United States to attend his daughter’s funeral in 1996.^[23]

On January 20, 2001, hours before leaving office, U.S. President Bill Clinton granted Rich what would prove to be a highly controversial presidential pardon. Several of Clinton’s strongest supporters distanced themselves from the decision.^[24] Former President Jimmy Carter, a fellow Democrat, said, “I don’t think there is any doubt that some of the factors in his pardon were attributable to his large gifts. In my opinion, that was disgraceful.”^[25] Clinton himself would later express regret for issuing the pardon, saying that “it wasn’t worth the damage to my reputation.”^[11]

Clinton’s critics alleged that Rich’s pardon had been bought, as Denise Rich had given more than $1 million^[26] to Clinton’s political party (the Democratic Party), including more than $100,000 to the Senate campaign of the president’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and $450,000 to the Clinton Library foundation during Clinton’s time in office.^[22] Clinton explained his decision by noting that similar cases were settled in civil, not criminal court.

Clinton also cited clemency pleas he had received from Israeli government officials, including then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Rich had made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations over the years, and many senior Israeli officials, such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, argued on his behalf behind the scenes.^[27] (Speculation about another rationale for Rich’s pardon involved his alleged involvement with the Israeli intelligence community.^[28][29] Rich reluctantly acknowledged in interviews with his biographer, Daniel Ammann, that he had assisted the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service,^[6][15] a claim that Ammann said was confirmed by a former Israeli intelligence officer.^[14]

***

Thirteen months ago, according to Foxman, he met in Paris with a former Mossad agent now on the Rich Foundation payroll who had the month before pledged $100,000 to A.D.L. Foxman came up with the idea of asking Denise Rich, the divorced wife of the man on the lam for 17 years, to intercede with Clinton for a pardon.

He knew her only from “reading the columns,” Foxman told reporters last weekend. However, he sat across the aisle from Mrs. Rich on Air Force Two when Clinton invited both of them to accompany the presidential party to Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. It was logical for him to presume that Rich’s former wife was on the government plane because she had some connection to the president.

That bright idea of Foxman’s led to e-mail from Rich’s top man in Israel to Rich lawyers in the U.S. Ultimately, a former Clinton White House counsel, Jack Quinn, used Denise Rich to circumvent expected Justice Department resistance to pardoning a defiant fugitive accused of the biggest tax rip-off in U.S. history.

Let me stipulate here that it is no sin to recommend mercy or point out good deeds done by unpopular targets of prosecutors. I regularly signed parole petitions for Nixon colleagues jailed after Watergate. And when prosecutor Charles Hynes led a New York Bar Association campaign to disbar a near-comatose Roy M. Cohn just before he died of AIDS, I denounced the vengeful lawyers as a pack of ghouls. I don’t knock loyalty.

But at issue here is the ease with which an unpatriotic wheeler-dealer can manipulate fine organizations and hungry politicians here and abroad into expunging all unanswered charges from his record.

Would we have known about the A.D.L. advice to Rich and intercession on his behalf if Congress had not begun an investigation? Unlikely; though he reported fully to some 40 members of the A.D.L. national executive committee on Feb. 3, for six weeks after the pardon firestorm, Foxman said nothing publicly.

Not until March 9, when the Burton committee contacted him, did A.D.L. release its official letter to Clinton whining about “Marc Rich’s suffering.” [photo, right]Only after cooperating with House investigators did Foxman admit publicly that it was his suggestion in Paris that led to the well- heeled Denise’s exploitation of her access to “Number One.”

In a March 19 letter to national commission members, he explained that his pardon request was partly “predicated on the fifteen years I knew of Marc Rich’s generous philanthropy and good deeds,” but lately “I began to question whether a person’s good deeds should overshadow other aspects of his behavior. In hindsight this case probably should not have had my involvement as it was not directly in ADL’s clear- cut mission. . . .”

That mission is to fight bigotry. The last time Foxman muddled it was to write Clinton asking for Jonathan Pollard’s release; commission members privately slapped him down because that prosecution had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, either.

The time is ripe for the A.D.L. – and other do-good and advocacy groups, too – to take a hard look at the ulterior motives of their money sources. It’s time to set out written policies to resist manipulation by rich sleazebags and to reprimand or fire staff members who do not get with the ethical program.

Abe dropped by my office a few minutes ago to take back that unfair telephone crack and answer questions about who sucked him into this mess, which takes some zip out of my conclusion. We wished each other a happy Passover.