Roger Clinton Said to Be Deeply Tied to Pardons

With President Clinton’s encouragement, his half brother, Roger, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby on behalf of as many as 13 people seeking presidential pardons and other favors, a key congressional panel has found.

This characterization goes far beyond what Roger Clinton has acknowledged about his activities in seeking presidential pardons and suggests that he was much more deeply involved than previously known.

The new revelations about the Clinton brothers are contained in the final report by the House Government Reform Committee, which for the last year has been investigating the pardon scandals. The report was obtained Tuesday by The Times.

The probe concluded that the former president and his administration repeatedly failed to properly check the backgrounds of people seeking pardons and sentence commutations. It also said the Clinton White House permitted a culture that provided easy opportunities for relatives and close associates of the president to make money on the side by lobbying for clemency and other presidential favors for convicted felons.

The Clinton team was besieged by requests for pardons and other favors. Some of those requests bypassed the normal Justice Department review system and instead went directly to the Oval Office, often at the urging of those who had the president’s ear.

“Bill Clinton made some very bad decisions when he gave away pardons,” said one official close to the committee’s investigation. “His administration very seldom did real background checks on many of those seeking pardon.”

Roger Clinton could not be reached for comment. Bill Clinton has denied that pardons were for sale.

The committee is expected to publicly release its report and vote on the findings Thursday. It carries no legal weight.

The House committee is headed by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), a longtime Clinton adversary. Clinton White House officials have decried the review as nothing more than a partisan attempt to hound the Clinton administration long after it has left the White House.

The panel’s report also provides new details about the prison commutation granted to convicted cocaine dealer Carlos Vignali of Los Angeles.

Congressional investigators found that the president’s brother-in-law Hugh Rodham repeatedly misled the White House in seeking a commutation for Vignali and suggested that former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was also behind the commutation.

Rodham Misstated on Fee Return, Probe Finds

In addition, investigators have concluded that Rodham, despite his public statements to the contrary, has returned less than one-fourth of the $204,000 fee that he said he had given back to the Vignali family.

The committee also determined that President Clinton granted a pardon to fugitive financier Marc Rich only after his sponsor, former White House Counsel Jack Quinn, went around the Justice Department. Quinn apparently did so on the advice of then-Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., who was hoping to be elevated to attorney general if Al Gore was elected president, the report found.

For instance, the committee said it found one e-mail from Holder to Quinn, written during the 2000 presidential recount, telling him to “go straight to wh [White House]” and that the “time is good” for a Rich pardon.

Holder has said that he learned of the Rich pardon just as Clinton was about to leave office and had hoped that prosecutors in New York, where Rich was convicted, were being allowed to give their recommendation against the pardon.

While strongly suggesting that laws were broken and that more FBI and Justice Department investigation is needed, the committee stopped short of alleging criminal wrongdoing.

However, the panel did note that a federal grand jury in New York has been investigating the scandal for a year, implying that criminal charges could eventually result.

Roger Clinton, in an interview last year with The Times, insisted that he asked his brother to pardon only six of his closest friends, none of whom received pardons, and that he never asked for or received compensation for those efforts. But the House committee has found a completely different picture.

“Roger Clinton engaged in a systematic effort to trade on his brother’s name,” the report said, and that most of those efforts involved pardons.

Use of Connections Reportedly Encouraged

“President Clinton encouraged Roger Clinton to capitalize on their relationship,” the report said. “At the beginning of his second term, President Clinton instructed Roger Clinton to use his connections to the administration to gain financial advantage.”

The report quotes George Locke, a former Arkansas state senator and close associate of Roger Clinton, as saying “that Bill Clinton had instructed him that since this was his last term in office, Roger should find a way to make a living and use his relationship with the president to his advantage.”

Locke has refused to publicly discuss his relationship with the Clintons after the pardon scandal.

The committee describes Roger Clinton as so eager to make money from pardons that he even approached Rita Lavelle, a former Reagan administration Environmental Protection Agency official.

Lavelle had been convicted of perjury in the 1980s, and she told the committee that she was approached by a Roger Clinton intermediary who asked for $30,000 for Roger to hand-carry her pardon petition to the president. She said she could not afford to pay that, but that Roger “agreed to deliver the petition anyway.”

Then, on the last night of the Clinton presidency, Roger asked her, “Do you have $100,000 to get this through?” Being bankrupt, she laughed and said no. Her pardon request was not granted.

In the Vignali case, the committee found that Hugh Rodham repeatedly “provided false and misleading information” to the White House about the Los Angeles man’s criminal history and advised the administration that the commutation for Vignali was “very important” to his sister, then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Now-Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) has denied any knowledge of her brother’s work on behalf of Vignali.

The report adds that Hugh Rodman repaid only $50,000 of his $204,000 fee from the Vignali family and “has no plans to return the remaining $154,000.”

Hugh Rodham has repeatedly refused to discuss his work on behalf of the Vignalis.

Holder, the deputy attorney general in the Clinton White House, has denied that his desire to be attorney general had anything to do with his involvement in the Rich pardon.

But, the report says, this incentive “provides a much clearer and more believable motivation than any offered by Holder to date.”

The report also explores Roger Clinton’s relationships with foreign governments. It says Roger received “substantial sums of money” from foreign governments and that he tried to pass some of the money on to his brother, only to be repeatedly told the president could not accept it.

‘Unexplained’ Checks Said to Be Received

Roger Clinton received at least $335,000 in “unexplained” blank travelers’ checks from Taiwan, South Korea and Venezuela, the report says, and he also was paid $30,000 by a company to lobby his brother to loosen U.S. restrictions on travel to Cuba.

The committee said Roger “participated in a plot to obtain a $35,000-per-month contract” from an Alabama airport promoter in exchange for urging then-Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater to speak at a company gathering.

The report also describes other Roger Clinton ventures, such as his previously reported receipt of $50,000 from an alleged organized crime family to win clemency for convicted drug dealer Rosario Gambino and a “substantial portion” of $225,000 put up by a Texas family to help Garland Lincecum be released from prison on fraud charges.