| Tyrannical said:
Ooops, my bad. Obama has corrupt politcol friends in other states too. I gotta say, Obama sure know how to pick them. Sometime after Marc Rich's wife donated 500k to the Clinton library, Eric Holder recomended a pardon for Marc Rich. Congress was so outraged, they held hearing on it even though they coul dnot reverse the pardon.
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Alright, well at least you are attempting to work with facts instead of fiction now.
There were several conditions on the pardon as well that you may have missed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich
Clinton explained his decision by noting that similar situations were settled in civil, not criminal court, and cited clemency pleas from Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
As a condition to the pardon, it was made clear that Rich would drop all procedural defenses against any civil actions brought against him by the United States upon his return there. That condition was consistent with the position that his alleged wrongdoing warranted only civil penalties, not criminal punishment.
In his letter to the New York Times, Bill Clinton explained why he pardoned Rich, noting that U.S. tax professors Bernard Wolfman of Harvard Law School and Martin Ginsburg of Georgetown University Law Center concluded that no crime was committed, and that the companies' tax reporting position was reasonable.
So there we have independent confirmation that the "crime" was not a criminal offense, and that it should have been resolved through civil litigation rather than criminal litigation. Furthermore, the pardon was granted on the condition that Rich comply with the civil process and submit to adjudication.
Even if there was a conflict of interests, can you explain to me how the choice was an unclear expression of the law or why Rich should have been prosecuted as a criminal when the laws don't suggest that he should be? Was Clinton doing anything that circumnavigated the judicial system even if in hindsight the choice may have been unwise based on the circumstances?
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
