SOME PARDONS LOOK OUTRAGEOUS

Critics ask: How low can he go?

During his eight years in office, President Clinton pardoned about
400 people, on a par with the number President Reagan pardoned during
his two terms, but consider: 140 of those, over a third of the total,
were pardoned during Clinton's last night in the White House.

He was up all night -- and kept the Justice Department up all night
- -- doing so.

It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the pardons -- and 36
commutations -- were done as Clinton headed out the White House door
to avoid the political consequences.

A pardon is largely symbolic. It does not erase the conviction but it
does restore certain privileges -- the right to vote, to own
firearms, to hold certain professional licenses and, in one
controversial case, the right to return to the United States.

To the wrath of law enforcement, Clinton pardoned fugitive financier
Marc Rich, charged in 1983 in what has been called the largest tax
evasion scheme in U.S. history. Rich is described as an enormously
generous donor to charities; his ex-wife is a prominent Democratic
fund-raiser; and he had the foresight to have as his attorney in
seeking the pardon Jack Quinn, a former Clinton White House counsel
and top aide to Vice President Gore.

The president could be considered merciful in pardoning his brother,
Roger, for a 1985 cocaine conviction, but the pardon of Whitewater
figure Susan McDougal, who sat in jail for months rather than testify
against Clinton, smacks of thanking her for keeping her mouth shut.

There appears to have been no systematic review or recommendation
process to screen the pardons. Clinton's first housing secretary,
Henry Cisneros, who pleaded to a misdemeanor charge in an independent
counsel investigation, did not even ask for a pardon.

And New York law enforcement authorities were outraged at the pardon
of Susan Rosenberg, a Weather Underground terrorist, charged but
never tried in a 1981 armored car robbery in which two police
officers and a guard were killed. The reason authorities never tried
her was that they assumed she would be serving out a 58-year sentence
for possession of 740 pounds of dynamite and a submachine gun. She
was released Saturday.

Also pardoned were three New York Hasidic Jews -- Hasidim are an
influential voting bloc in the Clintons' adopted state -- who were
convicted in 1999 of defrauding the government of millions in a bogus
school scheme.

The commutations largely went to minor drug offenders penalized by
unnecessarily harsh mandatory minimum sentences, and it's hard to
quarrel with that act of mercy, but one could have wished that while
in office Clinton had tried to reform mandatory minimums.

Whatever the merits of the individual pardons, the surreptitious
haste was typical of the Clinton White House at its worst -- sloppy,
self-indulgent and with a whiff of corruption.