You won’t be surprised to learn who investigated Bill Clinton for the corrupt act of getting paid for pardons – hint – he got off.
President Trump shared this morning that the story in Big Media about there being a pardon investigation into President Trump is fake news. President Trump is not Slick Willie.
Pardon investigation is Fake News!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2020
President Trump is not being investigated but former President Bill Clinton was investigated by the FBI for receiving money for pardons.
The FBI released a number of documents related to the William J. Clinton Foundation. The bulk of these records come from a 2001 FBI investigation into the pardon of Marc Rich, aka Marcell David Reich, by President Clinton in 2001. The FBI’s investigation was closed in 2005. (Of course most of the material is heavily redacted due to personal privacy protections and grand jury secrecy rules says the FBI.)
Reuters reported on Mr. Rich upon his death:
To his critics, he was a white-collar criminal, a serial sanctions breaker, whom they accused of building a fortune trading with revolutionary Iran, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, apartheid-era South Africa, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.
In interviews with journalist Daniel Ammann for his biography, “The King of Oil”, the normally obsessively secretive Rich admitted to bribing officials in countries such as Nigeria and to assisting the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.
Explaining Rich’s route to riches in an interview with Reuters in 2010, Ammann said: “He was faster and more aggressive than his competitors. He was able to recognize trends and seize opportunities before other traders. And he went where others feared to tread – geographically and morally.”
A U.S. government web site once described Rich more simply, as “a white male, 177 centimeters in height … wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Marshall Service.” In 1983, he was on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list indicted for tax evasion, fraud and racketeering. At the time, it was the biggest tax evasion case in U.S. history.
Rich, who valued trust, loyalty, secrecy and persistence, always insisted he did nothing illegal and among those who lobbied Clinton on his behalf for his pardon were Israeli political heavyweights Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres.
On learning of the indictment plans, Rich fled to Switzerland to escape the charges, which included exploiting the U.S. embargo against Iran, while it was holding U.S. hostages, to make huge profits on illicit Iranian oil sales.
He [Rich] remained under threat of a life sentence in a U.S. jail until Clinton pardoned him during the last chaotic hours of his presidency, a move that provoked moral outrage and bewilderment amongst some politicians.
Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, had donated funds for Clinton’s presidential library. The former president later said the donation was not a factor in his decision and he had acted partly in response to a request from Israel. But he regretted granting the pardon, calling it “terrible politics.”
“It wasn’t worth the damage to my reputation,” he told Newsweek magazine in 2002.
There was also scrutiny over the role of Eric Holder, now the attorney general and then a deputy attorney general who recommended the pardon.
Rudolph Giuliani, who had worked as a prosecutor on the Rich case before becoming New York Mayor, said in a statement: “Mark Rich committed serious crimes against the United States and then fled the country when he was called to account for his conduct. He should never have been pardoned.”
“The fact that Bill Clinton and Eric Holder engineered a pardon for him – without input from me, as the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted him, or Janet Reno, as Attorney General, will forever be a blemish on our justice system,” Giuliani said.
(Rudy Giuliani has been fighting Democrat criminals for a very long time.)
Fired FBI Director James Comey took over the Clinton – Marc Rich pardon case in 2002, according to far-left Politico:
“I was stunned when President Clinton pardoned them,” Comey said in a 2008 letter to Congress.
Comey took over the investigation of the pardons in 2002 when U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who launched the pardon probe, left the government. Comey left for Washington in 2003 when he was named deputy attorney general. The probe was finally closed down in 2005 by interim U.S. Attorney David Kelley, four years after it began.
At the time the Rich case was being investigated, the FBI Director was Robert Mueller, the same guy who 15 years later ran the criminal Mueller investigation (i.e. the Mueller gang were the criminals).
