| Bill Clinton forgave Bush's legs and elderly embezzler On Christmas Day, Bill Clinton used his constitutional powers to pardon 59 convicted Americans. This is not the end - in the three weeks remaining in the White House, the Democratic president, who has not previously abused the right to mercy, intends to make a number of fellow citizens happy, and it is this second party that may cause a scandal.
Among those already pardoned is Archibald Shaffer, former vice president of the giant Arkansas corporation Tyson Foods, known for its “Bush legs.” Schaffer, whom Clinton has known for more than 30 years, was convicted in June 1998 of bribing Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, although Espy was acquitted. Shaffer invited the minister to a banquet hosted by the corporation and paid his travel expenses in the amount of $2,500. The judge twice refused to punish him, considering the charge absurd, but the appeal court forced him to impose a small sentence - a year and one day.
The biggest sensation was the pardon of the former chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, 72-year-old Democrat Dan Rostenkowski, who pleaded guilty in 1996 to abuse of public funds (he spent 451 days in prison). Over the course of 20 years, Rostenkovsky robbed taxpayers of $600 thousand, but fraud in the United States is not punished very strictly; it is not drugs. Upon his release, he became a popular commentator and does not leave the television screen. Rostenkovsky is one of the elders of the US Democratic Party and has just called on its faction in Congress not to put a spoke in Bush's wheels. He has already served time, and a pardon will only restore his rights lost due to a criminal record. Rostenkovsky did not expect a pardon and did not even ask for it, since by law he had the right to do this only five years after his release.
But Clinton has the constitutional right to forgive anyone, even himself: his former confidante and architect of many victories, Dick Morris, excommunicated from the White House in 1996 for an affair with a Washington “call girl,” suggested in The New York Post that the president he will do so. Morris, who has become a prominent critic of the president and his wife Hillary, writes that in February 1997, Clinton told him of plans to pardon all aides who had been battered by his administration's scandals. “Is it possible that the president’s pen will tremble and he won’t at the same time pardon himself?” - the former adviser asks rhetorically.
Among the candidates for the second round of pardons there are people whose even a hint of leniency causes a stir in America. These are Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who shot and killed two FBI employees in 1975 and received two life sentences, and Jonathan Jay Pollard, who is serving a life sentence for spying for Israel. For the first time in history, hundreds of FBI employees staged a demonstration against the release of Peltier in front of the White House, and 58 congressmen, led by the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Richard Shelby, are protesting against the closure of the Pollard case.
Pollard, who worked as a volunteer in US naval intelligence, carried top-secret documents to the Israelis with suitcases and is considered a national hero in Israel. Local authorities have repeatedly petitioned for leniency towards him. American counterintelligence officials were furious when they learned that in October 1998, ahead of the Israeli-Palestinian talks on the Wye River outside Washington, Clinton had promised to consider pardoning him. The president wanted to sweeten the bitter pill for Jerusalem with a settlement in which the Israelis would make important concessions to the Palestinians in exchange for promises to refrain from further terrorism. CIA Director George Tenet is reported to have threatened to resign at the time. Now, by the way, Palestinian-Israeli negotiations are taking place in Washington again. Vladimir KOZLOVSKY, New York |
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