Bad Night for the GOP
Lewis Libby comes to Marc Rich’s defense.

March 2, 2001 8:55 a.m.

ewis Libby, a top Republican lawyer who is now vice president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told the House Government Reform Committee last night that he agreed with much of Bill Clinton's widely discredited op-ed article outlining the former president's reasons for pardoning fugitive tax evader Marc Rich.

In a session that stretched late into the evening, Libby, who represented Rich for several years ending in the spring of 2000, told the committee he believes Rich is not guilty of the tax and racketeering charges filed by federal prosecutors in 1983.  Libby also said he "quite possibly" would have considered applying for a pardon for Rich had Rich asked him to do so.

Libby, who said his law firms collected as much as $2 million for representing Rich, testified he had nothing to do with the application that led to clemency for Rich.  He declined to say whether he approved of the decision to pardon Rich, but he conceded that he called Rich on January 22, two days after the pardon, to "congratulate him on having reached a result that he had sought for a long time."  Libby testified he made the call from his home to make clear that he was calling in a personal capacity, and not as a representative of the Bush administration.

In a particularly damaging exchange with Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski , Libby agreed that Rich might be characterized as a traitor for fleeing the country and renouncing his American citizenship.  Kanjorski asked Libby why he would call a traitor to congratulate him on his good fortune in winning a pardon.  Visibly uncomfortable, Libby had no answer.

For Republicans, Libby's testimony was a sour endnote to what had been a long day of revelations that made President Clinton's decision to pardon Rich seem even more inexplicable than previously thought.

Early in the day, Republicans revealed that former deputy White House counsel Cheryl Mills, who played a prominent role in Clinton's impeachment defense and now serves as a trustee for the Clinton-library foundation, took part in a discussion with the president about the Rich pardon the night Clinton made his last-minute decision.  Mills left White House employment in the fall of 1999.  Several witnesses at the hearing — former White House chief of staff John Podesta, former White House counsel Beth Nolan, and former top Clinton adviser Bruce Lindsey — testified that Mills was often at the White House in the year and a half after she left to become a senior vice president at Oxygen Media, a television and internet firm devoted to women's programming.

"She continued to be a trusted adviser to the president," Nolan told the committee.  Nolan said that in the last weeks of the administration, Mills was at the White House frequently for end-of-term parties and other events. On the chaotic evening of January 19, Clinton called several advisers to the Oval Office to discuss his plans to pardon a number of people who had been convicted or pled guilty in the Whitewater, Mike Espy, and Henry Cisneros independent-counsel investigations.

"I invited Ms. Mills to join that conversation," said Bruce Lindsey, former close adviser to the president, citing Mills's expertise on independent-counsel issues.  Lindsey testified that at the meeting, Clinton raised the Rich pardon issue and that Mills took part in that discussion, too.  "I do not believe she took a position on it," Lindsey said, referring to the Rich case.

But it appears that Mills's involvement was greater than simply participating in one meeting.  Republicans on the committee also revealed that Roger Adams, the pardons attorney in the Justice Department, has told the committee he called the White House to discuss the Rich matter and ended up discussing it with Mills, who spoke authoritatively on the matter.  Adams was apparently somewhat bewildered that a former White House employee would be involved in pardon discussions.

In addition, the committee released a January 5, 2001 e-mail from Robert Fink, a lawyer for Marc Rich in New York, to two other members of the Rich team.  "Here is the letter Jack [former White House counsel Jack Quinn] just sent to the White House," Fink wrote.  "As you may notice his secretary said that Jack sent copies to Beth Nolan, Bruce Lindsey and Cheryl Mills.  April said they have clearance to deliver it to the WH [White House], so it will get there this evening, presumably before POTUS leaves for Camp David." Quinn told the committee that he brought Mills into the case in an effort to help convince Clinton to pardon Rich.

Earlier in the hearing, former Democratic National Committee finance chair Beth Dozoretz appeared briefly before the committee.  Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays read to her from a January 10, 2001 e-mail from an associate of Rich's to Quinn.  "DR [Rich's former wife Denise] called from Aspen," the e-mail began.  "Her friend B [Dozoretz] — who is with her — got a call today from potus — who said he was impressed by JQ's [Quinn's] last letter and that he wants to do it and is doing all possible to turn around the WH counsels."

Shays asked Dozoretz why she discussed the Rich case with the president. "Upon the advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer that question," Dozoretz said, citing her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.  Shays asked whether she would refuse to answer all questions on those grounds.  She said yes.

Georgia Republican Bob Barr asked Dozoretz whether she would at least tell the committee whether she intends to cooperate with the criminal investigation being conducted by federal prosecutors in New York.  She declined to answer that, too.

On another topic, the committee released information casting doubt on one of Quinn's main arguments in favor of the Rich pardon.  On February 8, Quinn testified that he was frustrated at the "intransigence" of federal prosecutors in New York who, Quinn said, were unwilling to discuss the case with Rich.  Quinn also testified that the prosecutors' use of RICO, the racketeering statute, was the "sledgehammer" that resulted in Rich's decision not to return to the United States to face charges.

Now it appears that prosecutors were not as inflexible as Quinn contended.  In his opening statement, committee chairman Dan Burton announced that in 1999 the government offered to drop the RICO charges against Rich if he would return to the U.S. to face trial.  E-mails between members of the Rich team indicate that prosecutors also agreed to set a bail for Rich in advance so he would not have to worry about being incarcerated before trial.  Rich refused the government's offer.

The committee also released information suggesting that the campaign to win a pardon for Rich began significantly earlier than was previously known. The idea was referred to in a February 10, 2000 e-mail from Avner Azulay, one of Rich's top advisers to Robert Fink, the New York lawyer.  The e-mail discussed strategies to follow in the case and concluded, "The present impasse leaves us with only one other option: the unconventional approach which has not yet been tried and which I have been proposing all along." That "unconventional approach" was apparently the pardon initiative.

The next month, on March 18, 2000, Azulay again e-mailed Fink.  "We are reverting to the idea discussed with Abe [Anti-Defamation League head Abraham Foxman]," the e-mail said, "which is to send DR [Denise Rich] on a 'personal' mission to NO1. with a well-prepared script."  Congressional investigators believe "NO1." refers to the president.

Quinn testified that he had no recollection of any such discussion, but he did not rule out the idea of early pardon discussions.  "It is entirely possible that…everyone of us involved in this thought out loud with each other," Quinn testified.  "It is possible that we were involved in a conversation where someone said, 'You know, we're going to have to try a pardon one of these days.'"

Finally, committee lawyers are preparing to examine the donor records of the Clinton library.  On Wednesday, Burton's lawyers saw a list of approximately 150 people and companies who have given or pledged at least $5,000 to the library.  The next step, which will take place today, will be for them to see the amounts of those donations and the dates they were given.

Because of their long and painstakingly detailed investigation of the campaign finance scandal, experts on Burton's staff are familiar with the names of most people who have given large sums of money to the Democratic party and Clinton-related causes over the years.  Congressional sources say there are some unfamiliar names on the library donor list.  Investigators will want to find out who those people are and whether they gave their own money to the library — or whether they served as fronts for the donations of others.