No longer on the website. Here it is:
Just before he completed his second term as President, Bill Clinton pardoned one hundred and thirty-nine felons including Mark Rich (tax evasion), his brother Roger (drug offense), former US House member Dan Rostenkowski (mail fraud) and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros (lying to the FBI). This represented about a third of the 457 people who received pardons or commutations during Clinton’s two terms as president. It is interesting to note that 33% of Clinton’s pardons were for people committing financial fraud.
Clinton was not alone in pardoning former political allies. Among the seventy-seven pardons granted by his predecessor George H. W. Bush were three co-conspirators in the Reagan era Iran-Contra scandal: Assistant Secretary of State, Elliott Abrams, National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, and an unusual pre-trial pardon for Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger.
Surprisingly, with the exception of George W. Bush, presidents pardoned about 18% of those applying. President George W. Bush is obviously saving up his quota of pardons for the penultimate day of his presidency. So far he has pardoned under 2% of the applicants for his mercy. He would have to pardon another 1600 people to reach the average leniency rate of his predecessors.
That should not be too difficult. I am sure that he will have many people in mind for those final days in office. On the military side, he will surely pardon the architect of the Iraq debacle, Donald Rumsfeld. The shame of the Defense Department is that only lower level individuals were prosecuted for the torture at Abu Ghraib. whole chain of command was complicit. I expect he will pardon all, from the Joint Chiefs to Central Command to the Generals and Colonels on the ground in Iraq as well as those in the CIA interrogators. It will be interesting to see whether his clemency extends to Brigadier Janis Karpinski and to Specialists Charles Graner and Lyndie England. If others are to be pardoned, so too should they.
On the civil side, the first round of pardons will surely go to the Justice Department - we must overlook the conflict of interest inherent in the Justice Department recommending that its own staff receive clemency. First in line must surely be Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who will receive clemency for his dereliction of duty in ensuring that his staff performed with integrity. Former members of the Department in need of clemency include John Yoo who devised the torture memoranda and his Defense Department colleague William Haynes; Monica Goodling who was involved in ensuring that non-political appointees to the Justice Department were ideologically pure. No doubt their subordinates and peers must also be protected from future prosecution. Some in the FBI and the NSA may have stepped over the line in wiretapping Americans at home.
Over on the financial side, former treasury secretary John Snow and incumbent Henry Paulson will be protected from indictment for their failure to anticipate the mortgage and banking meltdown. Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and their present and former colleagues at the Federal Reserve are in need of similar protection. Present and former executives of banks, mortgage companies and stockbroker firms will swell the ranks of Bush’s pre-indictment recipients of pardons.
On the regulatory side, the heads of the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, the Labor Department have all fallen short at protecting the drugs, food, and labor standards that we, as citizens, expect to enjoy. They too and their subordinates will expect pardons.
Finally, the President will pardon all who worked on his staff during his administration. We will never see Carl Rove and Harriet Myers being forced to testify. His press secretaries will be protected for the lies they had to tell. Scooter Libby can now expect a full pardon from the President and so get back the $250,000 fine he had to pay. David Addington, his successor and Vice President Cheney’s Cheney, will also be pardoned.
The President’s last act in office will surely be to pardon Vice President Cheney for all that he has wrought upon our country.
At the end of the day before his term ends, exhausted from approving all these pardons, the President will resign his office. Vice President Cheney will take the oath of office as President of the United States – Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts will scuffle to hold the Bible on which he swears this oath.
With luck, the only official act of President Cheney will be to pardon Mr. George W. Bush for all the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by his administration during his two terms as President.
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