CLINTON'S LAST-DAY CLEMENCY BENEFITS 176

Just two hours before surrendering the White House, President Clinton gave
parting gifts that lifted 176 Americans out of legal trouble, granting
pardons to figures from the Whitewater scandal, former Cabinet members, an
ex-governor, onetime fugitive heiress Patricia Hearst Shaw and his own
brother, Roger Clinton.

The extraordinary list, eclipsing in magnitude and scope the last-minute
legal forgiveness dispensed by previous presidents, includes Susan
McDougal, who was convicted of bank fraud in the Whitewater case, then went
to prison for refusing to say whether Clinton had testified truthfully at
her trial. Clinton pardoned his former secretary of housing and urban
development, Henry Cisneros, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about
how much money he had given a former mistress. The mistress, political
fundraiser Linda Jones, yesterday was granted a pardon, too.

Other beneficiaries of Clinton's generosity include an international
financier and indicted fugitive, Marc Rich; a leftist radical convicted of
conspiring to bomb the U.S. Capitol; a woman who illegally gave an eagle
feather to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.); and an array of drug
offenders serving long prison terms under mandatory sentencing laws. In a
rare move, Clinton also pardoned two former government officials who have
not even been convicted: ex-Arizona governor J. Fife Symington III, who was
facing a retrial on charges of real estate fraud, and John Deutch, who was
in the midst of negotiating a plea agreement with the Justice Department
over security violations while he directed the CIA.

The 140 pardons and 36 commuted prison sentences are as notable for those
omitted as for those Clinton forgave. The outgoing president decided not to
pardon junk bond trader Michael Milken or Leonard Peltier, a Native
American leader convicted in the shooting deaths of a pair of FBI agents.

Similarly, Clinton did not pardon Webster Hubbell, a former law partner of
Hillary Clinton, or Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former Navy analyst who pleaded
guilty to spying for Israel.

Taken together, the pardons were a dramatic final gesture for a president
whose tenure was marred by his own legal controversies -- and who had
reached an agreement with prosecutors only one day earlier to ward off any
possibility of his own indictment.

Through some of his pardons, Clinton appeared to be tying up loose ends
from many of the independent counsel investigations that had daunted him
and several senior members of his administration virtually from the
beginning of his tenure.

Some of his wide-ranging pardons provoked swift denunciation, although
relatives of people whose prison sentences he lifted praised him lavishly.

Sources from both the Clinton White House and the Justice Department said
the final list emerged from a frenzied and secretive process in which the
outgoing president brooded over several prominent names until early
yesterday morning. Clinton, who remained awake throughout his entire final
night as president, did not give the list his final approval until
mid-morning, immediately before it was made public.

Roger Adams, the U.S. pardon attorney in the Justice Department who has
been involved with pardons throughout the Clinton administration and now
oversees the process, said yesterday: "I've never seen anything like this."

"We were up literally all night as the White House continued to add names
of people they wanted to pardon," Adams said. "Many people on the list
didn't even apply for pardons." Some requests from the White House arrived
so late, Adams said, that pardon officials did not have time to conduct
record checks with the FBI.

The names his office received for the first time Friday night, Adams said,
included Roger Clinton, the president's younger brother, who pleaded guilty
in 1985 to conspiring to distribute cocaine. Adams said they also included
Richard Riley Jr., the son of Clinton's secretary of education, who was
sentenced to house arrest in 1993 on federal charges of conspiring to sell
cocaine and marijuana.

Clinton's press aides issued the list of names yesterday morning without
elaboration. They did not explain who the people are or what the
president's rationale had been.

Sources close to Clinton said the president had a particularly difficult
time deciding what to do about a few people he knows personally. They
include McDougal -- whom he ultimately pardoned -- and former Arkansas
governor Jim Guy Tucker, who was not pardoned. Aides said that Clinton had
been eager to pardon Tucker, who was convicted of fraud in a conspiracy
related to Whitewater, but that his staff warned him such a move would meet
public disapproval.

The ability to grant pardons is a prerogative of U.S. presidents, under the
Constitution. Pardons -- or official, legal forgiveness -- do not erase a
criminal record, but restore any citizen rights that were lost as a result.
Ordinarily, pardons are given to people who have served sentences and
rehabilitated themselves through contributions to society and other good works.

"Sometimes people want it because of a specific civic disability -- so they
can go hunting again, or get into the securities business," said lawyer
Margaret Love, a specialist who was the Justice Department's pardon
attorney under both Clinton and former president George Bush. "But . . .
most simply want . . . to remove the stigma of being a convicted felon."

Clinton is not the first president whose pardon decisions have been
controversial. Most notably, President Gerald R. Ford provoked a firestorm
of dissent when he pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon. Throughout his
two terms, Clinton granted nearly 400 pardons, almost six times as many as
the first President Bush did during his single term, and about as many as
President Reagan -- although Reagan granted them at a relatively steady
pace with no last-minute surprises.

Commutations, on the other hand, are generally granted to shorten a
sentence that is deemed too long or otherwise unfair -- or to reward
cooperation with the government. Many of yesterday's commutations, an
unusually large number to be granted at one time, involve first-time or
relatively minor drug offenders whose more culpable co-defendants ended up
serving shorter sentences.

But Clinton also commuted the death penalty of Piedmont, Ala., marijuana
trafficker David Ronald Chandler, who is on death row in Terre Haute, Ind.,
for arranging the murder of a police informer. The main witness in the case
against Chandler recanted his testimony and acknowledged committing the
murder himself.

Chandler, whose sentence now will be life without parole, was to have been
the first person executed by the federal government since 1963. Clinton's
chief of staff, John Podesta, said that Attorney General Janet Reno had
personally recommended the change in Chandler's sentence at the last minute.

"God bless President Clinton," his wife, Deborah, yesterday told the
Associated Press.

Antoinette Frink, now 49, former owner of a car dealership in Delaware,
Ohio, was released from a federal women's prison in Lexington, Ky.,
yesterday after serving 11 years of a 15 1/2-year sentence for selling cars
to a drug trafficker who used them to run cocaine. Co-defendants received
sentences ranging from six months to six years after cooperating with
authorities.

"She's extremely happy," Ross Nabatoff, her Washington attorney, said
yesterday. "I just got off the phone with her. I told her, 'Get out as soon
as you can. Don't pack your bags.' "

Others, however, greeted some of Clinton's decisions with less enthusiasm.

A lawyer who had prosecuted Rich and his longtime associate, Pincus Green,
expressed outrage. "This is astounding," said Morris Weinberg Jr., a Democrat.

In September 1983, Rich and Green, along with Rich's Swiss trading firm,
Marc Rich & Co., were indicted in what was then the largest tax-evasion
case in U.S. history. At the time, Rich and Green were in Switzerland, and
have never returned. Attempts to extradite them were unsuccessful because
Swiss officials said the extradition treaty did not cover tax fraud.

For those who had submitted applications to the Justice Department seeking
pardons, Adams, the pardon attorney, said he could not comment on whether
the department had supported or opposed their request. But in the case of
one woman forgiven by Clinton, Susan Rosenberg, a member of the radical
group, the Weather Underground, Adams said: "We certainly made the White
House aware on a number of occasions that there were victims in the crimes
committed by Rosenberg and that we were aware of their feelings."

Rosenberg was one of two 1960s radicals, imprisoned on weapons charges, who
won pardons. She was charged with conspiracy in the 1981 robbery of a
Brink's armored truck in New York, during which two police officers and a
security guard were killed. The other one, Linda Sue Evans, was serving a
40-year sentence for her role in a 1983 bombing attempt on the U.S. Capitol.

Clinton commuted the prison terms of several prominent New Yorkers who are
now constituents of his wife, the junior senator from that state. They are
three leaders of New York's Hasidic community accused of bilking the
government out of millions in education, housing and business loans and
grants. Benjamin Berger, Jacob Elbaum and David Goldstein, of the Rockland
County community of New Square in Rockland County, all faced long prison terms.

Among the most striking group to win pardons, however, were those connected
to the various scandals that marred Clinton's tenure in the White House.

In addition to McDougal, Clinton pardoned two other lesser-known figures
from the Whitewater case: Stephen A. Smith, a former aide to Clinton when
he was governor of Arkansas who pleaded guilty to misusing a loan; and
Robert W. Palmer, a Little Rock appraiser who pleaded guilty to conspiracy.

Clinton wiped the slate clean on independent counsel Donald Smaltz's
investigation of former agriculture secretary Mike Espy, who was acquitted
of accepting illegal gifts, but not before the probe swept up a number of
his associates.

He commuted the 27-month sentence of former Espy chief of staff Ronald H.
Blackley, convicted of making false statements regarding $22,000 he
accepted from agribusiness friends. And he pardoned four others convicted
of lesser offenses linked to the Espy probe. "I believe the decision was
made to release or pardon everybody connected to the Smaltz investigation,"
said Blackley attorney Sheldon Krantz.

Yesterday, Cisneros, the former housing secretary, dispatched a statement
saying that he "did not seek nor request this presidential action." He said
the unexpected pardon was "completely in keeping with the generosity and
understanding of President Clinton."

Staff writers James Grimaldi, Guy Gugliotta and John Harris, research
director Margot Williams, and researchers Lynn Davis, Bobbye Pratt and
Bridget Roeber contributed to this report.