House Speaker Paul Ryan on Saturday criticized President Donald Trump for pardoning a former Arizona sheriff, Joe Arpaio, becoming the highest-ranking Republican to object to the move. (Wall Street Journal, 8/27/17)
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A walk down Memory Lane
- Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive Marc Rich.
- Rich made a large part of his wealth, approximately $2 billion between 1979 and 1994, selling oil to the apartheid regime in South Africa when it faced a UN embargo. He did deals with Khadafy’s Libya, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, Communist dictatorships in Cuba and the Soviet Union itself. Little surprise that he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
- What bothered so many was that Clinton’s clemency to Rich reeked of payoff. In the run-up to the presidential pardon, the financier’s ex-wife Denise had donated $450,000 to the fledgling Clinton Library and “over $1 million to Democratic campaigns in the Clinton era.”
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The New York Post, in an exclusive story by Peter Schweitzer, has helpfully recapped in some detail another ‘famous’, actually ‘infamous,’ presidential pardon from a different era…back in 2001, the “good old days”…when America had great presidents like our most recent, Barack Obama.
The president back then was Bill Clinton. A lot of the youngsters at the Associated Press have heard of him and most of what they heard is that ‘he was good one’. Their reporting tends to reflect that sentiment.
Of course, the oldest of the crack AP team was probably at Columbia or Yale at the time where they were regaled about all the great progressive accomplishments of both the president and his lovely and bright wife.
Young Paul Ryan knew of President Clinton, and today can probably recall many of his good works. “Paulie” was a newly minted congressman back then. First sent to Washington in 1999.
Mr. Ryan was thus in Congress in 2001 when Bill Clinton, as he and his brilliant wife were packing up the White House silverware and preparing to launch their new career as the world’s most unselfish philanthropists after a wonderful 8 years of keeping America great.
Before the gracious couple departed, however, Mr. Clinton, grateful to friends as always, granted one more favor to a good and faithful friend…guy by the name of Marc Rich.
We won’t bore you with all the gory details. The Post story covers it all pretty well (except maybe for Eric Holder’s role in this sordid saga).
But nowhere, in our Google search did we find our current saintly Speaker of the House express his outrage toward what is generally recognized by non-partisan observers as a far more serious abuse of the presidential pardon power than the Arpaio pardon.
But then, this is Paul Ryan we’re talking about. A 100 percent Washington establishment darling and liberal media favorite when he’s selling out his party and his country…something he is frequently wont to do since voters expressed a view much at odds with Paulie and his establishment friends.
We won’t bore you further with our reminiscences. You can read all about the Clinton pardon of Marc Rich Here:
http://nypost.com/2016/01/17/after-pardoning-criminal-marc-rich-clintons-made-millions-off-friends/
DLH
