The FBI has published 129
pages of internal documents related to its investigation years ago into Bill
Clinton’s pardon of fugitive Democratic donor Marc Rich. According to the Washington
Post, the records don’t appear to provide much new information about the
matter (I haven’t yet reviewed them), but they serve as a reminder of the
scandal.
Naturally, Team
Hillary is steamed. Clinton flack Brian Fallon tweeted that the FBI’s move is
“odd.” He asked whether the agency plans to post documents about alleged
housing discrimination by Donald Trump in the 1970s.
I doubt that the FBI
ever investigated those allegations, so the answer is probably no. According to
the Washington
Post, however, the FBI did recently publish records relating Fred Trump,
Donald’s father. The records included eight pages of largely biographical
details about the elder Trump, much of which appeared to be compiled by the FBI
in 1988.
Fallon is right to
view the posting of the Rich pardon documents as odd. However, it does not
appear to be the result of any bias or impropriety by the FBI. The agency explains
that the documents were posted in response to pending public records requests
“automatically and electronically. . .in accordance with the law and
established procedures.” I imagine that’s also how documents compiled about
Fred Trump in 1988 came to be posted.
Fallon is also right
to be unhappy that the Rich pardon is receiving attention. It reminds the
public of how corrupt the Clintons are.
Clinton pardoned the international
fugitive — a major donor to Democrats, including Hillary — on his last day as
president. Even the left was appalled.
A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.”
The New Republic has said the pardon “is often mentioned as Exhibit A of
Clintonian sliminess.” Barney Frank viewed it as “a real betrayal by Bill
Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do something this
unjustified.” He found the pardon “contemptuous.”
Rich was no garden
variety crook. The
New York Post reminds us:
Marc
Rich was wanted for a list of charges going back decades. He had traded
illegally with America’s enemies including Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, where he
bought about $200 million worth of oil while revolutionaries allied with
Khomeini held 53 American hostages in 1979.
Rich
made a large part of his wealth, approximately $2 billion between 1979 and
1994, selling oil to the apartheid regime in South Africa when it faced a UN
embargo. He did deals with Khadafy’s Libya, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kim Il
Sung’s North Korea, Communist dictatorships in Cuba and the Soviet Union
itself. Little surprise that he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
Marc
Rich traded illegally with Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini (from left) and made deals
with Libya's Moammar Khadafy, Yogoslavia's Slobodan and other dictators.
Rich’s ex-wife had
donated $450,000 to the fledgling Clinton Library and more than $1 million to
Democratic campaigns in the Clinton era. As the New York Times, The New
Republic, and Barney Frank intuited, the pardon was an obvious payoff.
Bill Clinton
eventually admitted that the pardon was “terrible politics” because “it wasn’t
worth the damage to my reputation.”
Perhaps not. But the
pardon has continued to be worth money to the Clintons. The New York Post
reports:
In
the years following the scandal, the flow of funds from those connected to Marc
Rich or the pardon scandal have continued to the Clintons. Rich died in 2013.
But his business partners, lawyers, advisers and friends have showered millions
of dollars on the Clintons in the decade and a half following the scandal.
Nigerian
businessman Gilbert Chagoury is well known as a close ally and business associate
of Rich. The Nigerian media declared in 1999 that the “Gilbert Chagoury-Marc
Rich alliance remains a formidable foe.”…
Chagoury
has been very generous to the Clintons in the years following the Rich pardon.
He has organized an event at which Bill was paid $100,000 to speak (in 2003),
donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and in 2009 pledged a cool $1
billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. The Chagourys were also active in
Hillary’s 2008 presidential bid. Michel Chaghouri, a relative in Los Angeles,
was a bundler and served on her campaign staff. Numerous other relatives gave
the maximum $4,600 each to her campaign.
We wrote about the
Chagoury-Clinton connection here.
The Nigerian was convicted in Switzerland of money laundering in 2000. The
Clinton foundation considers him one of its “key guys.” It sought favors for
him from Hillary Clinton (via Huma Abedin).
As we noted
yesterday, the Justice Department official behind the Rich pardon was none
other than Eric Holder. Holder, who was contacted directly by Rich’s
attorney, bypassed the established process by which DOJ lawyers pardon
applications.
Ironically, Holder
just published an op-ed
in the Washington Post arguing that FBI Director Comey made a “serious error”
in resuming the Hillary Clinton email probe. Holder can’t be pleased by this
reminder of the corrupt Rich pardon in which he played such a shady role.
October has passed,
so let’s call this development a November surprise. With the election still a
week away, it may not be the last.
