On the July 5 edition of Hardball [transcript] Bob Shrum was up against former Cheney aid Ron Christie when the discussion was pushed into the area of Clinton's pardons. Shrum says
I do not defend all of those pardons that Bill Clinton made on his last day in office. But I think there is a critical distinction; none of those pardons has anyone every alleged could have in any way insulated him from some kind of criminal investigation.
At this point Christie named Susan Mcdougal and Henry Cisneros as examples where Clinton had done just that.
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The transcript cuts off after Mcdougal, but from the exchange that follows it is clear the everyone understood it was about Henry Cisneros that Shrum was most objecting to. In fact Shrum for quite some time kept talking over Christie demanding he justify his claim that somehow Henry Cisneros had embarrassing things to say about Clinton.
When it was clear that Shrum was not going to let Christie keep talking unless he would support his claim that Clinton was involved in the Henry Cisneros' "crime" Matthews spoke up and explained just what the that crime was and that
Henry Cisneros in his application for the position of HUD secretary gave a dishonest answer about how much money he was paying off his girlfriend. And that was a problem. You can say that is the president’s fault, but only, Ron, highly tangential, that some how Bill Clinton knew how much money that Henry Cisneros was paying his girlfriend. How would he have known that?
I am glad that Shrum called Christie for suggesting that the Henry Cisneros pardon could have been part of some sort of Clinton cover-up but it seems to me that the case of Susan Mcdougal is more instructive.
Ken Starr held her in various rat hole jails for a long time to try to get her to talk, in a situation where she feared if she told the truth Starr felt he had evidence to charge that as perjury and use her as some sort of surrogate for Clinton. She never did agree to testify for Starr and was convicted of contempt and served her time.
Then, at the end of the day, and when all threat of additional incarceration was past, Clinton gave her a pardon because he rightly thought she had been treated unfairly. But can you imagine what the response would have been if after Starr had first gotten an order that would have caused Mcdougal to be confined President Clinton had given her some sort of commutation so that she never spent a day in jail and only later gave her a full pardon?
I have no doubt that that would have been one of the impeachment charges brought against Clinton. But of course Clinton did not do any such thing because he clearly thought that would seem to be a clear case of his obstructing the work of the independent counsel -- and it would have been.
And yet this is exactly what Bush has done. If he had let Libby start to serve his sentence and then gave him a pardon that let him out of prison in January '08 that would be one thing, but to keep him from going to prison at all and remove the possibility that he would talk to try to get the prosecutor to cut him some slack is a clear case of obstruction.
This is the critical thing about the Libby commutation: it obstructs an ongoing investigation.