Clinton Aides Say He Ignored Their Advice on Rich Pardon

President Clinton granted some of his most controversial clemencies over the objections of his closest advisors and despite evidence that one applicant, Los Angeles cocaine dealer Carlos Vignali, had been untruthful in his application, a congressional hearing revealed Thursday.

Testifying publicly for the first time, three high-ranking Clinton administration aides told the House Government Reform Committee that they urged the former president to deny the pardon requests of fugitive commodities broker Marc Rich and his partner, Pincus Green.

“In my judgment, the fact that they were fugitives was the beginning and the end of the discussion,” said Bruce Lindsey, a former deputy White House counsel and longtime Clinton advisor. “For the president, that was a factor, but not the beginning and the end.”

Lindsey, John Podesta, who was Clinton’s chief of staff, and Beth Nolan, former White House counsel, all said Thursday that they were stunned to learn that Clinton chose in the waning hours of his presidency to grant the Rich pardon.

“I had the sense he had accepted our judgment and that this wouldn’t happen,” Podesta said.

The Rich pardon, one of 177 clemencies Clinton granted on Jan. 20, is being investigated by two congressional committees and a federal grand jury in New York.

All of the investigations center on the question of whether the Rich pardon was, in effect, bought with large political contributions. All three former aides and several Democratic committee members, including ranking member Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), disputed that notion Thursday. The aides said they could not recall any discussions of the Rich pardon in connection with donations to Democratic causes or the Clinton presidential library.

The committee also wanted to question Democratic fund-raiser Beth Dozoretz along those lines. But Dozoretz, a supporter of clemency for the former husband of her friend Denise Rich who has pledged to raise $1 million for Clinton’s library, twice refused to answer, citing her constitutional right against self-incrimination and mentioning the federal probe of the Rich case.

On the Vignali commutation, congressional investigators and others who have reviewed his case said Thursday that his clemency application was misleading in its representation of his other run-ins with law enforcement. While Vignali listed two arrests, he omitted two others. He also failed to mention his onetime admission to authorities that he was a gang member.

Vignali was freed in January by Clinton after serving six years of a 15-year term for helping to finance a narcotics operation that funneled 800 pounds of cocaine from Los Angeles to Minnesota. Clinton commuted Vignali’s sentence after a concerted campaign by Southern California officeholders and civic leaders and behind-the-scenes lobbying by Hugh Rodham, a Florida lawyer and Clinton’s brother-in-law.

Rodham acknowledged through an attorney’s letter to the committee Thursday that Vignali’s wealthy businessman father, Horacio, paid him $204,280 for his efforts.

“We learned that Carlos Vignali, the cocaine dealer, who paid Hugh Rodham, lied on his pardon application,” House committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) said at the start of the often-contentious seven-hour hearing. “He lied about his prior offenses, and he still got a pardon.”

Burton was referring to Vignali’s omission of two previous arrests--one in 1988 for reckless driving and one in 1990 for domestic abuse. He was not convicted in those cases.

The new revelation about the Vignali case is significant because it suggests that Clinton decided to release him from prison even though White House officials knew he had been untruthful. Lindsey and other aides said Thursday that the extent of misrepresentations about the Vignali case was unclear and vastly outweighed by appeals from leaders ranging from Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

Lindsey, who testified that he was initially opposed to Vignali’s release, said, “I decided that given the community support, that in the county in which he would live, if they were not concerned about him coming back,” a commutation for him might be acceptable. Lindsey said the president was also impressed by the community leaders’ interest in Vignali’s case.

Lindsey said that he had recalled seeing evidence of prior arrests in Vignali’s application when it was forwarded to the White House from the pardon attorney’s office early this year.

Congressional investigators and others familiar with the Vignali case said his clemency application did list his two 1989 arrests for “unruly conduct,” at least one of which resulted in a conviction.

But Vignali’s failure to admit all of his arrests--and that he had once told law enforcement authorities that he was an “admitted” member of a West Covina gang--was seen by the Justice Department as strong evidence that he had not been entirely truthful in his plea for freedom.

“The [application] form asked for it and he didn’t put it in there,” said one official who reviewed the case and asked not to be named. “He lied by omission.”

Ed Rucker, a Los Angeles lawyer now representing Horacio Vignali in his dealings with congressional investigators, declined Thursday to comment on the new information.

“I don’t have any response about the committee,” he said. “My client prefers to move on. I’m hoping for my client’s sake that this is going to die a quick political death. He’s a good, decent man and he doesn’t deserve this.”

Burton also revealed Thursday that former Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric Holder had refused to support his department’s recommendation that the president deny Vignali a commutation.

Holder’s signature on the recommendation was not required. But he reportedly told other Justice Department officials that he had not signed the Vignali paperwork because he was being criticized by the White House for sending over too many clemency applications with recommendations that they be denied.

“Apparently, he didn’t want to sign any more pardon denials,” Burton said. “He was the deputy attorney general, and he didn’t want to sign a memo opposing a pardon of a major drug dealer. Why?”

Holder could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Holder also had played a central role in the pardon of Rich, taking a “neutral, but leaning favorable” position when he discussed the fugitive’s case with White House officials in the hours before Clinton decided to pardon him on Jan. 20.

But Lindsey, Nolan and Podesta all said that they had remained firm in their protests that Clinton not pardon Rich.

All three testified that as midnight approached on Jan. 19, Clinton’s last night as president, they expected him to deny Rich’s application. But they learned hours later that “foreign policy considerations”--appeals by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and other world leaders--had swayed him.

“It certainly seemed that he was not going to grant it, and then that Mr. Barak’s phone call had been significant,” Nolan told the committee.

Washington lawyer and lobbyist Jack Quinn, a former Clinton White House counsel who took Rich’s case to the president, has said that Rich remained a fugitive because of a “RICO sledgehammer”--a reference to the tax-evasion and money-laundering indictment against him that was based on a federal racketeering and conspiracy statute.

Quinn had complained that prosecutors had refused to negotiate with Rich’s lawyers--an argument echoed by Clinton in a recent newspaper opinion-page justification of his decision in the Rich case.

But on Thursday, the House committee released a new document that countered Quinn’s argument. The documentation was a year-old e-mail from one of Rich’s attorneys saying that prosecutors had offered to drop the racketeering charge if Rich returned to the United States.

Robert Fink, a lawyer for Rich, also said in the same February 2000 e-mail to Avner Azulay, who once ran Israel’s spy agency, that the prosecutor’s proposal would have allowed Rich to remain free on bail on the other charges while he took on the government in court.

Testimony also centered Thursday on the role played by Hugh Rodham in the Vignali commutation and a pardon won by convicted herbal remedy marketer Almon Glenn Braswell. Rodham insisted through his lawyer, Nancy Luque, that he had never approached the president or his sister, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, about either case.

Similarly, the senior Clinton aides all said they knew of no contacts between Rodham and the president. They seemed less certain--although they expressed considerable doubt--whether Clinton had been told of Rodham’s work on behalf of the two clemency requests.

On another front, a second Rodham sibling, Tony Rodham, had to contend with charges that he had lobbied for a pardon on behalf of a Tennessee couple he had known for years. The couple told The Times on Thursday they had not paid Tony Rodham “a dime.”

Clinton pardoned Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, on March 15, 2000. The Gregorys, who own a carnival company in Tennessee, had been convicted in 1982 for bank fraud and sentenced to probation.

Edgar Gregory said Thursday that he was a longtime supporter and friend of Clinton, first meeting him when he was governor of Arkansas. He met Tony Rodham at a fund-raiser in 1994, hiring him years later as a consultant for his business.

“I can say to you unequivocally he never got a dime for helping us in any pardon, nor did he ask for one,” Gregory said. Nor did he funnel any additional business to him in exchange for the pardon, he said.

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Times staff writer Lisa Getter contributed to this story.