Rich’s business partners, lawyers, advisers and friends have showered millions of dollars on the Clintons in the decade and a half following the scandal. In the years following the scandal, the flow of funds from those connected to Marc Rich or the pardon scandal have continued to the Clintons. Days after it was revealed that a senior UBS executive named Pierre de Weck had written a letter to Clinton “to support his request for a pardon,” the Swiss banking giant canceled its discussions with Clinton about a lucrative post-White House speech, apparently “worried that a large speaking fee would create an appearance of impropriety.”Įven Bill Clinton eventually admitted that the pardon had been “terrible politics.” “It wasn’t worth the damage to my reputation,” he said.īut while the pardon was a political mistake, it certainly was not a financial one. The stench of the scandal in early 2001 sent people scurrying. Judge Abner Mikva, a counsel in the Clinton White House and mentor to President Obama, noted that even Obama “was very, very dismayed by the Marc Rich pardon and the basis on which it appears to have been granted.”īut does the story end there? Is it possible the payoffs continued after he left office? Denise Rich (left,) Marc’s ex-wife, donated $450,000 to the Clinton Library in the run-up to the presidential pardon. 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.” What bothered so many was that Clinton’s clemency to Rich reeked of payoff. Marc Rich traded illegally with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini (from left) and made deals with Libya’s Moammar Khadafy, Yogoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung - earning him a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. Little surprise that he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.įacing prosecution by Rudy Giuliani in 1983, Rich fled to Switzerland and lived in exile.

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. Rich made a large part of his wealth, approximately $2 billion between 19, selling oil to the apartheid regime in South Africa when it faced a UN embargo. He had traded illegally with America’s enemies including Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, where he bought about $200 million worth of oil while revolutionaries allied with Khomeini held 53 American hostages in 1979. Marc Rich was wanted for a list of charges going back decades.

A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.”Ĭongressman Barney Frank added, “It was a real betrayal by Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do something this unjustified. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s political career.

20, 2001, his last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive Marc Rich.

Rich woozworld accounts 2016