Marc Rich Pardon: Lobbying, Backlash, and Failed Investigations

The Marc Rich pardon was President Bill Clinton’s January 20, 2001 grant of clemency to Marc Rich, a billionaire commodities trader who had been a fugitive from a 1983 federal indictment for tax evasion, racketeering, wire fraud, and illegal oil trading with Iran during the hostage crisis. Issued on Clinton’s last day in office after a lobbying campaign that went around the Justice Department, the pardon drew bipartisan outrage, two congressional investigations, and a federal criminal probe. No charges were ever brought, and the pardon stands as one of the most disputed uses of presidential clemency since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974.¹

Who Marc Rich Was and What He Was Charged With

Rich built one of the world’s largest commodity trading firms out of Zug, Switzerland, and made his fortune trading in places others avoided, including Iran, apartheid-era South Africa, Cuba, and Libya.²

On September 19, 1983, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York returned a 51-count indictment against Rich, his partner Pincus Green, and their companies. Rudolph Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney, called it “the largest income-tax evasion indictment ever returned by a grand jury.”³⁴¹

A separate count alleged that Rich and Green bought 6.2 million barrels of crude oil from the National Iranian Oil Company while Americans were being held hostage in Tehran, a $200 million transaction.⁵ If convicted on all counts, the two men faced potential sentences of more than 300 years.⁶

Rather than face trial, Rich fled to Switzerland in 1983, taking his records with him. Both men renounced their U.S. citizenship to complicate extradition. Switzerland did not treat tax evasion as a criminal offense and did not observe the American embargo against Iran, so extradition efforts failed.⁷⁶ Rich was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and the IRS offered a $500,000 reward for his capture. While he lived in Swiss villas, his companies pleaded guilty and paid roughly $200 million in fines and civil penalties.¹

Rich himself was blunt about the Iran deals in a later ABC News interview: “It was a political development which did not affect the business. It was very unpleasant and tragic for the hostages and humiliating for America, but it didn’t affect the business.”⁸

How the Pardon Was Obtained

Rich hired Jack Quinn, Clinton’s former White House counsel, as his attorney. Quinn’s strategy skipped the standard clemency process. On December 11, 2000, he delivered Rich’s pardon application directly to the White House rather than to the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, where career officials and the prosecutors who built the original case would have reviewed it.⁹

The House Government Reform Committee later found that Quinn and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder “cut the Justice Department out of the process.” Quinn lobbied White House officials directly, including Bruce Lindsey and John Podesta, and sent Clinton a letter on January 18, 2001, the day before the pardon issued. The committee concluded that Quinn had “misled the White House” by claiming the Justice Department had never tried to negotiate a plea with Rich, when in fact prosecutors had tried for years, and that Quinn was “likely legally prohibited from lobbying the White House” under post-employment restrictions on former government officials.¹⁰

Rich had originally hired Quinn on Holder’s recommendation. Holder had told Rich to retain a Washington lawyer “who knows the process.”¹⁰ When Quinn told Holder the application would go to the White House, Holder told the White House he felt “neutral, leaning towards favorable.” He later told the Washington Post: “If I had focused on this in a way that I could have, should have, the recommendation I would have given him would have been, ‘Don’t do this, Mr. President.'”¹¹

The House committee’s report suggested Holder’s judgment may have been influenced by his interest in an endorsement from Quinn for the attorney general job in a possible Al Gore administration. Holder called his handling “flawed” in congressional testimony and denied wrongdoing. The pardon resurfaced in 2008 when President-elect Barack Obama nominated him for attorney general; Senator Arlen Specter called it “a big question” for his confirmation.¹²

The Money and the Lobbying

Denise Rich, Marc Rich’s ex-wife, was at the “forefront of a coordinated effort” to secure the pardon.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

The donations were made at the urging of Beth Dozoretz, a friend and former finance chair of the Democratic National Committee.¹⁶ White House visitor logs recorded both women entering the residence at 5:29 p.m. on January 19, 2001, the evening before Clinton left office; Dozoretz disputed the record.¹⁷ Called before the House committee, both invoked the Fifth Amendment. Denise Rich’s lawyer said she had “done nothing wrong with regard to the pardon and knows of no wrongdoing by others.”¹⁴

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak personally lobbied Clinton at least three times. National Security Council transcripts show Barak first raised the matter on December 11, 2000, the same day Rich’s lawyers filed the petition: “here he is highly appreciated for his support of so many philanthropic institutions and funds, and that if I can, I would like to make my recommendation to consider his case.” Barak raised it again on January 8, 2001, when Clinton said he was “working on” a memo and added, “it’s best that we not say much about that.” During that call Barak remarked that a pardon could be “important … financially,” a comment noted by House investigators. On January 19, Clinton told Barak he was “trying to do something on clemency for Rich” but was uneasy about the lack of precedent for pardoning a fugitive who had never returned to face charges.¹⁸

More than 50 prominent Israelis, including former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, wrote to Clinton urging the pardon. Rich had a long record of Israeli philanthropy: he, Green, and their foundations had donated nearly $60 million to Israeli and Jewish organizations over the years.¹⁹ Six years earlier, in 1995, the Israeli government had asked U.S. diplomats to let Rich travel internationally without risk of arrest; the State Department had refused.²⁰

Clinton’s Stated Reasons

In a New York Times letter after leaving office, Clinton gave eight reasons for the pardon. He argued that investigations suggested Rich and Green may have been “prosecuted improperly,” noted that their companies had already “paid millions of dollars in compensation to the government,” and cited advocacy from three Republican attorneys and from “present and former high-ranking Israeli officials of both major political parties and leaders of Jewish communities in America and Europe.”²¹

Clinton acknowledged that he would normally have denied clemency because the two men had not returned to face charges, but called this an “unusual case.” As a condition of the pardon, he required Rich and Green to waive all defenses, including statute-of-limitations protections, against any future civil claims by the government.²¹

The Backlash

The reaction crossed party lines. Some of the sharpest criticism came from Clinton’s own allies. Representative Barney Frank called it a “real betrayal.” Senator Paul Wellstone said the pardon “puts back into sharp focus all the questions about values and ethics in relation to the Clinton administration.” Senator Pat Leahy described it as “terrible,” “inexcusable,” and “outrageous.”²²

Martin Auerbach, a former prosecutor on the original case, contrasted Rich’s treatment with ordinary criminal defendants, noting that common offenders like “kids who hot-wire cars” go to prison rather than living in “comfortable exile.”²² Giuliani, by then mayor of New York City, said he was “shocked” and said Rich had “spent money buying the town” in Switzerland while evading justice for nearly two decades.²³

The Investigations

The House Government Reform Committee, chaired by Representative Dan Burton, opened hearings on February 8, 2001, three weeks after the pardon. Burton framed the question directly: “This doesn’t look like a very good case for a pardon, so the question we have is: How did it happen?”¹⁵

The committee issued 153 subpoenas and collected about 25,000 pages of documents. Holder testified and acknowledged his handling had been flawed. Former assistant U.S. attorneys Morris “Sandy” Weinberg Jr. and Martin Auerbach testified about the strength of the original case. Former White House counsel Beth Nolan and presidential advisor Bruce Lindsey declined to testify.⁹ Weinberg told the committee that as “international fugitives who renounced their American citizenship in 1983 … we do not believe that Mr. Rich or Mr. Green should have been candidates for pardon.”⁷

The committee’s final report, Justice Undone: Clemency Decisions in the Clinton White House, was published in May 2002. It concluded the pardon resulted from a “rushed and one-sided process” and “deeply flawed judgment” by the president. The majority raised the possibility of corruption but stopped short of a definitive finding. The minority view, led by ranking member Henry Waxman, said the committee had produced no evidence of bribery, quid pro quo, or criminal conspiracy, and that the pardon, while poor judgment, was a constitutionally protected exercise of presidential power.²⁴

A parallel criminal investigation was run out of the Southern District of New York. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White was empowered to review all 177 of Clinton’s final pardons and commutations and to prosecute if wrongdoing was found.²⁵ After White left, James Comey took over. Comey had led the Rich and Green prosecution in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He said he was “stunned” by the pardon in a 2008 letter to Congress, and an FBI memo from December 2001 described him as “enthusiastic about this investigation.”²⁶ Neither White nor Comey brought charges. The Justice Department found no illegal behavior by Clinton.²⁷

Why the Pardon Could Not Be Undone

Article II of the Constitution grants the president power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” The Supreme Court has described this power as unlimited within its sphere, reaching all federal offenses before, during, or after legal proceedings. As the Court held in Schick v. Reed, the power “flows from the Constitution alone” and cannot be “modified, abridged, or diminished” by Congress.²⁸

Congress could investigate the pardon, criticize it, and hold hearings on it, but could not reverse it. The episode revived proposals for a constitutional amendment to constrain the pardon power, echoing proposals floated after the Nixon pardon in 1974. None advanced.²⁸

What Changed Afterward

The most concrete effect of the Rich pardon was on how later presidents handled clemency. The George W. Bush administration leaned heavily on recommendations from career officials at the Office of the Pardon Attorney, specifically to avoid the kind of direct White House lobbying that produced the Rich pardon. The Obama administration continued that practice. Officials said the “shadow” of the case made the executive branch far more cautious about granting pardons at all, which partly explained a decline in the overall numbers: Bush granted 189 pardons, the fewest of any modern president except his father, and Obama in his first three years granted only 22 while rejecting nearly 900.²⁹

The Rich case has been cited repeatedly in later clemency controversies, alongside George H.W. Bush’s Iran-Contra pardons, as an example of what critics call political cronyism in the exercise of clemency.³⁰ When Donald Trump issued pardons to political allies, commentators returned to Rich as precedent, noting that both administrations had bypassed the normal screening apparatus in favor of ad hoc decision-making.²⁷

Marc Rich died of a stroke on June 26, 2013, at his home in Lucerne, Switzerland, at 78, and was buried in Israel. Despite the full pardon twelve years earlier, he never returned to the United States, reportedly fearing further legal action. Forbes estimated his assets at $2.5 billion at the time of his death.²³¹

1
The New York Times. Marc Rich, Pardoned Financier, Dies at 78
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The Guardian. Marc Rich, Commodities Trader and Fugitive, Dies
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The New York Times. Marc Rich Indicted in Vast Tax Evasion Case
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The Washington Post. Jury Indicts Marc Rich, Others in Largest Tax Evasion Case
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Time. Marc Rich and Iran Oil Dealings
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CBS News. Pardoned Financier Marc Rich Dead at 78
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PBS NewsHour. Pardon Probe: Marc Rich
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ABC News. Iran Sanctions: Sobering Lessons of Marc Rich
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GovInfo. House Committee on Government Reform Hearing
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GovInfo. Justice Undone: Clemency Decisions in the Clinton White House
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Politico. Marc Rich Pardon May Haunt Holder
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ProPublica. Questions for Potential AG Holder on Clinton Pardon
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ABC News. Denise Rich and the Clinton Library Donations
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CNN. Pardon Probe
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ABC News. House Government Reform Committee Investigates Rich Pardon
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The Washington Post. Denise Rich Gave Clinton Library $450,000
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CNN. Rich Pardon Investigation
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CNN. Rich Pardon Transcripts
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Los Angeles Times. Marc Rich and the Mossad
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The New York Times. U.S. Diplomats Turned Aside Israeli Push on Rich’s Behalf
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ABC News. Clinton’s Rationale for the Rich Pardon
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Brookings Institution. Bill Clinton’s Last Outrage
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ABC News. Giuliani Reacts to Rich Pardon
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GovInfo. Justice Undone: Clemency Decisions in the Clinton White House
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ABC News. Clinton Pardon Investigation
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Politico. James Comey, FBI, and Bill Clinton
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NBC News. Trump, Bill Clinton Pardon Scandals Should Help Biden Fix Flawed System
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Constitution Annotated (Congress.gov). Presidential Pardon Power
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ProPublica. The Shadow of Marc Rich
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Florida Legislative History (FLVC). Presidential Pardons and Public Trust
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Haaretz. Marc Rich, the Ayatollahs, and Israel