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The family business It Had to Be HughBy Rick Horowitz
My brother-in-law is a lawyer. He's a good lawyer. He works hard, he knows his stuff, he does right by his clients. So: Are certain people dangling hundreds of thousands of dollars in front of my brother-in-law to get them a presidential pardon? Absolutely not. There's one thing wrong with my brother-in-law: I'm not the president. Hugh Rodham didn't have that problem. His brother-in-law -- sister Hillary's hubby -- had the run of the White House until noon on the 20th of January, and he was bound and determined to use every last minute of it to flex his presidential prerogatives. Lucky Hugh -- until they made him give the money back. There's no end to this stuff, is there? Just in case the Marc Rich pardon wasn't sleazy enough, here are two more cases -- one a pardon, one a commutation -- that have the definite smell of rotting fish about them. One guy was a major cocaine trafficker who's still unrepentant about his crimes, the other a businessman convicted of perjury and mail fraud who was still under active investigation for possible tax evasion and money laundering. Both men were craving some executive clemency. Both men knew they had to scour the country for a lawyer who could make it happen, a lawyer with special expertise in these matters, a lawyer with the dedication, the imagination, the persuasive powers to move mountains. Or they could skip all the niceties and just hire the president's brother-in-law. "We are deeply disturbed." That's the president -- the former president -- talking. "We" being he and she, the ex-prez and the ex-Hillary Rodham. And what they'd like you to know (another day, another statement) is that they're perfectly clean on this one. That's what they'd like you to know. But that's not exactly what they said. "Yesterday I became aware of press inquiries that Hugh Rodham received a contingency fee in connection with a pardon application for Glenn Braswell and a fee for work on Carlos Vignali's commutation application. Neither Hillary nor I had any knowledge of such payments..." What they're not saying is that they had no knowledge of Hugh Rodham's involvement in these cases -- merely that they didn't have knowledge that he was being paid for it. Actually -- these are the Clintons, remember -- they're not even saying that, not exactly. They're saying that neither Bill nor Hill "had any knowledge of such payments." Which is to say that they might not have known the precise arrangements -- a contingency fee from one client, a fee for work from the other -- or the particular dollar amounts at stake. But they're not necessarily saying that they were totally clueless about Hugh's financial interest. (Does the Rodham clan do anything for free these days?) The fledgling senator from the Empire State, meanwhile, has issued her own statement, which includes this seemingly straightforward sentence: "Hugh did not speak with me about these applications." Which might even be literally true. But which hardly rules out the possibility -- these are the Clintons, remember -- that Hugh didn't "speak" with her about the applications, but he "wrote" to her. (Or he used sign language.) Or that he didn't speak to "her," but spoke to someone "close to her" who also had the president's ear -- Bruce Lindsey, for instance. Or that... That's what's so much fun about dealing with the Clintons; they've got a language all their own. You can read their words the way you'd read them if an ordinary person had said them. Or you can remember the source, and the track record, in which case you'd better slide each syllable under the microscope and twist it and turn it and check it out from every conceivable angle, and a few more that look entirely inconceivable. Hard to do while you're holding your nose. Posted 2/22/01. You'll
find only the freshest stuff at "Rick's" -- tell your friends! (Or your
brother-in-law.)
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Rick Horowitz
