Philadelphia — Former President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich is an act so contrary to accepted notions of good government that it has virtually no defenders besides Rich’s lawyers.
But Clinton’s ability to cover his tracks and slip through legal cracks will always outstrip the ability of congressional investigators and federal prosecutors to make him accountable.
Unfortunately, the latest twist in this story has ominous implications for Israel and American Jews.
In an opinion article published by The New York Times on Feb. 18, Clinton listed eight different reasons for the pardon of a man accused of serious crimes and linked to scandalous business dealings with the world’s worst dictatorships.
The eighth point, and the only one Clinton began with the word “importantly,” stated that “many present and former high-ranking Israeli officials of both major political parties and leaders of Jewish communities in America and Europe urged the pardon of Mr. Rich … ”
Clinton did not admit his mistake and denied that the pardon was a quid pro quo for the massive contributions Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, gave to the Democrats and to his own presidential library. He insisted that “foreign-policy considerations [i.e. Israel’s wishes] and the legal arguments” were the only reasons for his action.
Clinton seemed to be telling the world, “Don’t blame me: The Jews made me do it.”
Up to this point, the Rich affair’s stench had only marginally attached itself to the Jewish community, which actually learned after the fact that many Israeli and American Jewish big shots had urged the pardon.
It was bad enough that people like Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council; Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League; and Marlene Post, the former international president of Hadassah, had joined former prime minister Ehud Barak and others in speaking for Rich.
Mistaken impression
All these Jewish VIPs writing letters may have given the White House the mistaken impression that giving Rich a free pass for serious crimes was a Jewish issue. That few American Jews had even heard of Rich — let alone cared about a man who had renounced his American citizenship — doesn’t seem to have entered the discussion.
But now, with Clinton’s statement putting Israel and the Jews at the center of this mess, the Jewish angle stops being a sidebar to the story.
Indeed, last week The New York Times devoted a story solely to whether Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel had joined the clamor for Rich’s pardon. Wiesel claims he did not, which provides some comfort for those of us wondering whether anyone was unwilling to sell his good name for Rich’s money.
A careful reading of the record seems to show that cash for the Democrats and the access of former White House consul Jack Quinn were far more important than anything Marlene Post had to say about Rich.
But while experience should teach us to treat anything Clinton says as having tenuous relation to the truth, his assertion that Jewish lobbying for Rich was a decisive factor has a degree of credibility.
It may well be that Clinton saw the Rich pardon as, in part, a way of doing a favor for some of his friends and loyal supporters. Clinton may have looked at the two-page list of Israeli and American Jewish machers and concluded that pardoning Rich was a big deal to the Jews.
The notion that Rich’s pardon advanced American foreign policy is laughable. The revelations of some of Rich’s “good deeds” (accomplished in the course of immoral business dealings with Iran, Libya, North Korea and the former Soviet Union) raise questions by themselves.
One report claims that when Egypt paid compensation to the families of Israeli victims of an Egyptian border-guard’s murder spree in the 1980s, it was really Rich who paid.
In other words, Rich helped cover up the Egyptians’ unwillingness to act responsibly, and the subterfuge helped lessen pressure on them to begin acting like the “moderates” we are told they are.
Another Rich “good deed” is funding programs in the Gaza Strip supposed to help bolster the peace process. But anyone with a passing acquaintance with the issue of aid to the Palestinian Authority knows such donations were bribes pocketed by P.A. leader Yasser Arafat and his cronies.
Maybe Rich’s donations and unspecified help given to save endangered Jews are worthy of recognition. But they did not merit a full-court press to gain him a pardon he didn’t deserve.
Worse, the campaign for Rich distracted Clinton at a critical moment in the effort to pardon convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Pollard’s spying for Israel was wrong, and he deserved to be punished.
But after 15 years, there’s no longer a rationale for keeping him in jail, especially given the government misconduct in his plea bargain. There is a genuine Jewish consensus that giving Pollard clemency is the right thing to do. And, after having first entrapped and then abandoned him, Israel’s leaders had a responsibility to try to gain Pollard his freedom.
At this point, helping Pollard has become pidyon shvuyim , “redeeming a Jewish captive.” That is not the case with Rich, whose roost in Switzerland is considerably cushier than Pollard’s cell.
Rich’s petition may have enabled Clinton to think he had a choice between Rich or Pollard. If so, the testimonials of all those leaders and rabbis bought by Rich’s donations made it easier for Clinton to deny Pollard. That means the spy is doomed to at least several more years in jail.
Even worse, the involvement of Israel in the Rich scandal may help undermine U.S. support for the Jewish state at a crucial moment when the peace process has failed and the new government needs American backing.
At best, Clinton is probably skirting the truth when he puts so much of the onus for the Rich pardon on Israel and the Jews. But that doesn’t erase the terrible mistake Israeli and American Jewish leaders made by involving themselves in Rich’s web of influence peddling.
This pardon was not a Jewish issue. They had no right to speak in our name or to associate our honor with this disreputable character.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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