Pardon is back in focus for the Justice nominee

Mr. Quinn and his legal team sought to make the case that Mr. Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, had been wrongly prosecuted by the office of Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was the United States attorney in Manhattan at the time of the indictment, and that the charges against them should best have been treated as a civil matter, not a criminal one.

One of the first people Mr. Quinn contacted was Mr. Holder, his former colleague. Mr. Quinn wanted his help in interceding with prosecutors in Manhattan, and the two men had several conversations about the topic beginning in October 1999.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were unwilling to negotiate with Mr. Rich’s lawyers while he remained a fugitive. Mr. Holder told Mr. Quinn in one phone call in November 1999 that he believed the prosecutors’ refusal to meet with the Rich lawyer was “ridiculous,” according to notes by Mr. Quinn obtained by House government reform committee investigators as part of a three-volume report on Mr. Clinton’s pardons.

In February 2000, Mr. Quinn sent Mr. Holder a memorandum entitled “Why D.O.J. Should Review the Marc Rich Indictment.” About a month later, Mr. Holder spoke with Mr. Quinn again and told him that “we’re all sympathetic” and that the legal “equities” in the issue were “on your side.” Pressed to explain the remark when he appeared before Congress a year later, Mr. Holder said that he meant only that he thought it was “unreasonable” for prosecutors in Manhattan not to meet with Mr. Rich’s lawyers and that he was not intending to assess the merits of the case.

By the fall of 2000, efforts to re-open the criminal case were dead, and Mr. Rich’s lawyers had moved on to the idea of a pardon.

Again, Mr. Quinn turned to Mr. Holder. On Nov. 21, 2000, at the close of a meeting on a separate topic, Mr. Quinn took Mr. Holder aside, told him he was planning on filing a lengthy pardon petition with the White House and asked whether the White House should contact Mr. Holder for his opinion, according to Mr. Quinn’s account. (Mr. Holder said he did not remember the conversation but did not dispute the account.)

In a separate e-mail message that Mr. Quinn sent three days before that to other members of the Rich team, under the topic “Eric,” he wrote: “Spoke to him last evening. Says to go straight to W.H. Also says timing is good.”

For the next months, Mr. Rich’s team pressed ahead with the pardon, soliciting foreign leaders from Spain, Israel and elsewhere to speak to the White House about Mr. Rich’s philanthropic work.

Still, many White House officials remained opposed to the idea because of the precedent it would set to pardon a fugitive. Prosecutors in New York would “howl,” Mr. Holder told Mr. Quinn.

On Jan. 19, 2001, Mr. Quinn called Mr. Holder and let him know that the White House would be contacting him for his recommendation on the pardon, which he said was receiving “serious consideration.” Mr. Holder told him that he did not have a personal problem with the pardon, and Mr. Quinn quickly passed on the gist of the conversation to the White House.

Minutes later, Mr. Holder received a call from Beth Nolan, the White House counsel, who had opposed the pardon idea and was surprised to hear that Mr. Holder apparently felt differently.

Mr. Holder, according to Ms. Nolan’s testimony, told her that if the Israelis were in fact pushing for the pardon, he would find that “persuasive” and would be “neutral leaning toward” favorable.

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Mr. Holder told Congressional investigators that he assumed the pardon was going to be rejected and that his comments were not intended to push it through. “I was ‘neutral’ because I didn’t have a basis to make a determination,” he testified.

But investigators for the House government reform committee, in a final report in 2002, concluded that Mr. Holder’s input on Jan. 19, 2001, had a “significant impact” in giving the Justice Department’s imprimatur, even though no formal review was conducted by the department’s pardon office. The next day, Mr. Clinton signed the pardon, setting off the final controversy of his terms. The office normally reviews all clemency applications.

After Mr. Clinton left office, a federal grand jury investigation was eventually closed with a finding that no criminal wrongdoing had occurred.

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