NEW YORK -- It is "utterly false" to suggest fugitive financier Marc Rich was pardoned in return for donations to the Clinton library, former President Clinton wrote in an Op-Ed piece in Sunday editions of The New York Times.
Clinton said he pardoned Rich, who allegedly evaded $48 million in U.S. taxes, for a number of reasons, and only after concluding that the case should have been handled in a civil rather than criminal court.
"The suggestion that I granted the pardons because Mr. Rich's former wife, Denise, made political contributions and contributed to the Clinton library foundation is utterly false," Clinton wrote.
The former president said he specifically fashioned the pardon to allow for the pursuit of possible civil charges against Rich.
"There was absolutely no quid pro quo. Indeed, other friends and financial supporters sought pardons in cases, which, after careful consideration based on the information available to me, I determined I could not grant," he wrote.
Furthermore, Clinton noted that under the terms of the pardon Rich was required to waive all legal defenses he might have planned to use in the event of civil litigation brought by the government after the pardon.
Clinton also wrote that "the case for the pardons was reviewed and advocated" by former White House counsel Jack Quinn and three Republican attorneys: Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Leonard Garment, a former Nixon White House official; and William Bradford Reynolds, a former official in the Reagan Justice Department.
All three of the Republican attorneys denied the claim.
"It is absolutely false that I knew about and endorsed the idea of a pardon," Garment said in a separate article in the Times.
Reynolds, a Washington lawyer who represented Rich in the early 1990s, told The Associated Press on Sunday he did not think the pardon was "appropriate," adding: "I was as surprised as everybody else was."
Reynolds said of Clinton's column: "I was astounded. I have had no communications with the Clinton administration or the president or Jack Quinn having to do with the effort to obtain the pardon at any time."
He said that while he was representing Rich, he had sought to have the charges reduced. "I do agree that the indictment was improperly brought and the charges were not well founded. There was a good reason to seek some type of a plea bargain."
Reynolds added: "When that failed, I had no more to do with it."
Juleanna Glover Weiss, spokeswoman for Cheney, told the AP that Libby was no longer Rich's attorney by spring 2000.
"The assertion that Mr. Libby had anything to do with President Clinton's pardon is nonsense," she said.
Clinton's last-minute pardon of the billionaire financier, who has lived in Switzerland since fleeing a 1983 indictment on tax evasion and other charges, has prompted an investigation by federal prosecutors in New York and congressional hearings in Washington.
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