About that terrible pardon . . .

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The Right has been bloviating about the dangers of the Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, since his name first surfaced after the election. The National Review was horrified about his “leftist” views:

He is convinced justice in America needs to be “established” rather than enforced; he’s excited about hate crimes and enthusiastic about the constitutionally dubious Violence Against Women Act; he’s a supporter of affirmative action and a practitioner of the statistical voodoo that makes it possible to burden police departments with accusations of racial profiling and the states with charges of racially skewed death-penalty enforcement; he’s more likely to be animated by a touchy-feely Reno-esque agenda than traditional enforcement against crimes; he’s in favor of ending the detentions of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and favors income redistribution to address the supposed root causes of crime.

Well, that’s pretty scary all right. One can see why the Right would be concerned. Since no one else is likely to be worried,  however, they bring up the really really bad thing he did. And if Dick Morris says it’s bad, it must be really super bad.

You may not always agree with his political analysis but Dick Morris, perhaps better than anyone willing to talk about it, knows his Clinton-ology. Morris reminded us that Eric Holder played a leading role in one of the most infamous events of a presidency filled with infamy: the pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. Morris dubbed candidate Obama’s decision to select Holder as one of three people charged with vice-presidential vetting his “first clear, serious mistake.”

Rich, of course, was the commodities trader who fled the country in 1983 to escape prosecution for tax evasion, racketeering, and trading with the enemy. Rich’s attorneys circumvented normal procedures, took the pardon to the White House attorneys, and gained pardon for their client, whose wife just happened to be a friend and major donor to the Clinton library, the Democratic Party, and Clinton’s legal defense fund. A firestorm ensued as did congressional investigations in which Democrats as well as Republicans excoriated the Clintons’ conduct.

That’s the big one, that’s what the Right and the media keep harping on: the nefarious pardon of Marc Rich. From the wingnut perspective, this is a double whammy because they get to excoriate Holder (and by extension, Barack Obama) and at the same time remind everyone what a horrible beast Bill Clinton was. And everyone knows it was a nefarious act because everyone knows that Marc Rich was a crook and Clinton buddy, so this all smacks of patronage — even though Rich has never returned to the US, and never taken advantage of that pardon because Bill Clinton included a caveat: Rich would have to pay millions of dollars in back taxes.

Was patronage and cronyism behind the pardon and was it a really really bad thing? Maybe not so much. Joe Conason offers some real background:

Sitting quiet and grave before the committee, Holder listened as Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., one of the leading windbags of our time, held forth on how dreadful Rich is and how awful the pardon was. The fugitive trader, who still lives in Switzerland, had “a reprehensible record,” Specter said — alluding to reports that Rich did business in Iraq and Iran. The Pennsylvania Republican demanded to know how Holder could possibly have recommended a pardon for such an odious figure.

No doubt Holder was advised by the president-elect’s transition team not to argue with Specter or anyone else about Rich. He must have been told not to talk about the foreign-policy issues that heavily influenced his view of the Rich decision. So he offered a meek mea culpa, took his lumps from Specter, and promised that his mistakes had made him a better man. Considering that his objective is to get through the hearings without undue stress, that was probably the wisest course. Telling the truth would only have inflamed the Republicans and the press, while creating unwanted drama for Obama.

Still, it would have been a refreshing change from the usual confirmation minuet if instead of humbly apologizing, Holder had tartly instructed the buffoonish Specter, his fellow senators, the press, and the public about the actual circumstances of the Rich affair. He might have started with the fact that continuous lobbying on Rich’s behalf from the highest Israeli leaders and their American friends — among whom Specter no doubt counts himself — became even more intense in the days before Clinton left office. He could have noted that such pressures coincided with Clinton’s efforts to conclude a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. And he could have explained to Specter that Rich’s deals in Iran and Iraq were often related to his other role — as an asset of the Mossad who gathered intelligence and helped to rescue endangered Jews from those regimes.

The pressure on Clinton to issue the pardon from Israel and its supporters came at a critical moment at the tail end of his presidency.

As the president mulled Rich’s application, he was preoccupied with his final and most ambitious efforts to revive the Mideast peace talks that had imploded at Camp David during the summer of 2000. He was talking virtually every day with Ehud Barak, then Israel’s prime minister, trying to persuade the Jewish state’s leader to approve concessions to the Palestinians. That was only weeks before national elections were to take place in Israel, with Barak trailing in polls and heading toward defeat.

Echoing Barak’s pleas on behalf of Rich were Clinton’s old friend Shimon Peres, former Mossad director general Shabtai Shavit, and a host of other important figures in Israel and the American Jewish community. Winning the pardon was a top priority for Israeli officials because Rich had long been a financial and intelligence asset of the Jewish state, carrying out missions in many hostile countries where he did business. Although commentators in the mainstream and right-wing media have discounted this aspect of the controversy, they often seem as unfamiliar with critical facts as the average senator.

Anyone care to offer odds on whether the mainstream media will offer this side of the story? Or will they just put a black mark on the incoming Attorney General before he even starts?

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