Did FBI Drop the Ball on Pardons?
InsightMag.com
By Paul M. Rodriguez
prodriguez@InsightMag.com
Insight has learned that the FBI was tipped off months in advance that fugitives Marc Rich and Pinky Green were to get Clinton pardons in a bizarre financial scheme.
Five months before Bill Clinton left the White House in late January 2001, the FBI received a shocking tip: International fugitives Marc Rich and Pinky Green would be pardoned by the president in the waning hours of his administration. And along with the tip were detailed allegations of financial payoffs to ensure the presidential actions, Insight has learned.
At the time the FBI received this information in mid-August 2000, Rich and Green were well known to the bureau as indicted tax cheats and lavishly rich fugitives on the lam. Rich’s ex-wife was a close friend of Clinton and a big-time contributor and fund-raiser for Democrats. But even to casual observers the two fugitives were not plausible candidates for presidential pardons.
Incredibly, despite the national dustup when news of the actual pardons broke following a late-evening notification of the Department of Justice (DOJ) by the White House on Jan. 19 — less than 18 hours before Clinton was to leave office — the bureau did not follow up on the confidential information it had received on the alleged pardons scheme from a previously reliable source. In fact, the bureau sat on the tipster’s information until late March.
Moreover, despite a written report sent to FBI headquarters last year by a veteran agent at an FBI field office who received the original tip, neither top FBI brass nor senior officials at DOJ, according to insiders interviewed by Insight, were informed about the then-unimaginable pardons secretly being worked on by Clinton and supporters of Rich and Green. Nor were top officials told about millions of dollars alleged to be deposited in secret bank accounts for Clinton and others identified as involved in securing the pardons.
Current and former FBI and Justice officials who have spoken to Insight on condition of anonymity say that had they known of the field-office report they would have acted quickly to try to block the last-minute pardons of the two high-profile fugitives. “You’re damn right we would have been on alert to stop this!” a recently retired official says. “All hell would have broken out if we had been told.”
Adding insult to injury, say law-enforcement sources, was what appears to be a subsequent decision by FBI headquarters to delay sharing this information with Mary Jo White. She is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who is investigating possible criminal actions associated with the Rich/Green and other pardons (some of which were negotiated for but not granted).
According to a highly placed source, one of the FBI agents ultimately assigned to look into the tip and associated allegations told a colleague in May of this year that no decision had been made at that time to inform White. “We’ll decide if and when to tell White,” the agent was paraphrased as saying, according to notes made by a participant at one of several meetings held to discuss how to handle the potentially explosive information.
It is unclear whether White subsequently was informed, but word had not filtered up to senior DOJ officials of the Clinton era who were on the job until summer retirements or transfers. “This is the first I’ve heard about it,” said a shocked former Justice official contacted by Insight just days before this issue went to print. “And I think I would have gotten wind of this.”
Indeed, even former FBI director Louis Freeh, according to agency sources, did not know about the information from the previously reliable source, at least through early March of this year. That is when pressure was applied internally by a retired federal agent once assigned to Washington who was familiar with the Rich/Green pardons tip and alleged payments. This source, who has requested anonymity, couldn’t understand why such information, detailed far in advance of the pardons, was not being followed up on even after the fact. “I had to make a lot of calls and get a little bit ugly to get the ball rolling,” the source tells Insight.
Even a full-bore investigation by the House Government Reform Committee — including several days of public hearings — did not turn up the fact that the FBI had been warned in advance that Rich and Green would be pardoned by Clinton and that secret payoffs were alleged to be part of the deal. Nor had the congressional investigators picked up any information after their February and early March hearings to suggest that the FBI or the DOJ had been tipped off earlier or that even now they are working on — or did work on — confirming such information, Insight has confirmed.
Although the FBI has declined official comment, sources in and out of the agency are not sure at this point whether White is on the case. “It’s possible that she’s aware of it [since May] but so far feels it’s not credible enough to send out her own team. … [Maybe] she’s waiting to see what the field-office agents come up with before moving in,” says an FBI special agent. This assessment was based on information that indicated only FBI field agents — four to date — had looked into the detailed claims by the previously reliable source. And these agents are not known to be working on any aspect of White’s expansive probe, Insight has been told.
Calls to White’s office concerning these matters were not returned by press time.
“It’s [also] possible that the FBI doesn’t feel the information is credible and has informed the Southern District [of New York] and it, in turn, has said to just keep ’em posted on any developments. That’s a possibility,” says a second FBI source. “It’s pretty much a black hole up there [in the Southern District], so it might be a situation where she [White] knows about this but just didn’t want to immediately pursue it and left it to Washington to develop.”
A third scenario for failure to follow up on the alleged pardons scheme was offered by another federal agent: “They just can’t advance the ball beyond what the tipster provided. It happens sometimes.” According to Justice officials, if the FBI is investigating (or has looked into) allegations that Clinton granted pardons to two of the most-wanted fugitives in U.S. history in return for secret payoffs, then nobody at the DOJ seems aware of it — or is talking about it.
“Even if the allegations are pure baloney something like this, especially given the ruckus Clinton caused by his pardons, would have been on the attorney general’s desk because it involved allegations of presidential wrongdoing,” says a high-ranking Justice source familiar with such situations. “These are handled differently than run-of-the-mill allegations … [especially] since some of the details proved to be accurate.” The reference is to the naming of Rich and Green and provision of other details so far in advance of the “midnight” pardons.
Follow-up occurred only in the late spring, and then only after considerable pressure was applied by the retired federal agent formerly assigned in Washington. And repeated calls were needed to kick start even a preliminary inquiry. “It’s as if they don’t want to find anything,” the retired agent tells Insight. “The problem I’ve got with this is that, once Washington was ‘reminded’ about it in late February, nothing happened for weeks until repeated calls were made making a fuss about it all.”
“It’s a total screwup,” says a current U.S. government official familiar with an extensive ongoing review of FBI operations in the aftermath of the Robert Hanssen espionage caper and other cases that have embarrassed the bureau and raised questions about its internal controls, such as in the Timothy McVeigh paperwork fiasco. This government source recently was briefed on the confidential information delivered to the FBI last August and is looking into the subsequent handling of the matter. “They can say what they want about it before the pardons occurred, but how in the hell do you explain not doing anything with the information until many, many weeks after the scandal hits?” says a second U.S. government official also reviewing FBI operations.
This is precisely the question that Congress and the incoming FBI director, Robert Mueller, will have to answer. As one former federal agent puts it, even if it’s a case of a stopped watch getting it right twice a day, “how does somebody out of nowhere pick out two names that aren’t on anyone’s radar and get timing and details right? Makes you wonder about the rest of the information. I’d certainly want to check it out, wouldn’t you?”
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