Roger Clinton Says He Promised Friends Pardons

WASHINGTON —  Roger Clinton said Friday that he promised a half-dozen of his closest friends, including men he had met in prison, that his brother, former President Clinton, would grant them pardons before he left the White House.

Insisting that he never solicited money or accepted any, Roger Clinton said he compiled a list of six names, noted why they should be pardoned and placed the list in a convenient place in the White House that his brother could not miss.

“I put it into a stack of papers on a table in the White House where he would see it,” Roger Clinton said in a telephone interview with The Times.

“I put the names on it. I put down their relationship to me. And I said they had all gone through the Justice Department and they were deserving.”

Then, about a week or 10 days later, Roger Clinton said, just as his brother’s term was coming to an end, he asked the president what he thought of the list. He said the president told him he “would look into it.”

On Jan. 21, Roger Clinton said he was dismayed to learn from a newspaper that his brother had decided against pardoning any of his friends.

Despite the fact that the president pardoned him for a 1980s drug conviction, Roger Clinton said he was so dejected because his friends had been denied clemency that he did not talk with his brother for two weeks.

“It sort of caused a rift,” he said. “My feelings were hurt. I was a disaster.

“I couldn’t understand why none of my requests for pardons for my friends were granted. I thought they all deserved it.”

Roger Clinton, 44, often has turned to his older brother for help. When they were growing up, Bill Clinton, whose father died in a car accident three months before he was born, tried to protect Roger, 10 years his junior, and their mother from Roger Clinton Sr., an abusive alcoholic who adopted Bill Clinton.

In the 1980s, Roger ran into a different kind of trouble, and it was his brother, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who authorized a sting that led to his arrest on drug charges. In 1985, Roger pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to two years in prison. He served one year at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Worth and was released to a halfway house in Dallas.

Of his pardon work, the younger Clinton said Friday that he also helped connect his friends with lawyers, assisted them in filling out pardon applications and made sure all the paperwork was filed “timely and properly” with the Justice Department.

“I worked hard around my brother,” he said, explaining that he had worked hard to get his friends lined up for pardons through normal channels before he left the list for the president in the White House.

“I went through the proper way. I sent it all in. I made sure that they had all their paperwork filled out through their lawyers and that it all had been sent into the Justice Department.

“I did everything legitimately,” he added. “I took no money.”

He declined to identify his friends or to say whether he had been involved with any clemencies that were granted.

Former President Clinton granted 140 pardons and 36 commutations on his last day in office, and since then a growing controversy has swirled around his clemency grants for certain applicants--most notably a pardon for fugitive commodities broker Marc Rich.

The president’s brother-in-law Hugh Rodham accepted $400,000 for pushing through two clemencies: $200,000 for a commutation for convicted drug dealer Carlos Vignali of Los Angeles and $200,000 for a pardon for herbal-remedy marketer Almon Glenn Braswell of Florida.

The president and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), have said that they did not know Rodham was working on behalf of those applicants. Rodham has since returned the money.

But two congressional committees are ratcheting up separate investigations to determine whether improper influence was brought to bear on the former president and whether the Rich pardon or any others were in effect bought with political contributions or promises of favors.

Roger Clinton said he was surprised to learn that Hugh Rodham had taken money.

“I’m in shock. I had no clue. I had no clue. But I do know one thing: Hugh is a great guy and we all are human, and people should let it go once he’s corrected it” and returned the money.

Rodham emerged Friday from his first-floor apartment in Coral Gables, Fla., where he had cloistered himself since revelations surfaced about his fee work on behalf of Vignali and Braswell.

Rodham hurried from his apartment to an automobile, saying only: “You’ve got my statement. Have a real nice day.” Then he drove away.

In his statement earlier in the week, Rodham said he was giving back the $400,000 at “his family’s request to return legal fees.”

But Ed Rucker, a Los Angeles criminal lawyer representing Carlos Vignali’s father, Horacio Vignali, declined to say Friday whether Rodham had returned the $200,000 given him by Horacio Vignali.

Rucker noted that Rodham’s agreement to return the fee had been made with former President Clinton and Sen. Clinton “and not to my client.”

Rucker also said that Rodham has not been in contact with Vignali since his role in the commutation was made public. “He [Horacio Vignali] hasn’t heard anything,” Rucker said, adding that he too had not had any communication with Rodham.

The House Government Reform Committee has sent Roger Clinton a letter asking for detailed information about any work he did for anyone seeking presidential clemency. The letter also stated that the committee “had received reports that you were involved in representing individuals seeking pardons from President Clinton.”

On Thursday, a spokeswoman for former President Clinton revealed that Roger Clinton had presented a list of his “friends and acquaintances” to his brother for pardons. She said that the president sent the list to the Justice Department for review and she confirmed that all were denied.

At the same time, investigators for Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who is spearheading a Senate Judiciary Committee review of pardon irregularities, expanded his panel’s investigation of three cases: the Vignali and Braswell clemencies and one of the two pardons that was handled by Sen. Clinton’s campaign treasurer.

William Reynolds, a spokesman for Specter, said committee investigators also will look “into the circumstances regarding the payments that Hugh Rodham received for his actions in the Braswell and Vignali pardons.”

An official familiar with the inquiry said the committee also will try to determine whether investigators should look into the clemency efforts of Roger Clinton. “The nepotism connection is clearly worth exploring,” said one investigator.

Roger Clinton was reached by telephone at his Los Angeles-area home in Torrance. Initially, he was reluctant to talk. “I’ve got a yard full of reporters like buzzards out here,” he complained.

And, he quickly added, without being asked: “I didn’t get any money for any kind of pardons. Nobody on my list, which consisted of only my best friends I’ve known for 20 years or more. Not only did I not get any money but none of them got pardons.”

Insisting that he was only innocently trying to help friends, he said that in hindsight he should not have promised that he could deliver clemency and that he realizes now that his brother might not have been able to come through.

“I didn’t foresee what was going to happen,” he acknowledged.

Roger Clinton said that he put together the list as the culmination of an effort that he began when his brother first became president in 1993. His friends “weren’t bugging me,” he said. “You’ve never been in prison and in need of a pardon. But you want it for your namesake, for your children, for your record.

“I was just in the hopes that if I put these six people on my list and if I waited and didn’t bother my brother the entire eight years and didn’t question him or even bring it up, and dotted my i’s and crossed my t’s, I could take it to him, tell him it’s all done and that they were all qualified.

“I assumed wrong.”

The day his brother left office, Roger Clinton said he expected to have good news for his friends. But, he said, “nobody was more surprised than me. . . . I read the list in the newspaper. And when I heard 140 pardons, I counted them all.

“And my friends’ names were not on it. . . . I put my heart and my soul into this.”

He said he could not face his friends, decided not to call them. And in the month that has passed, only one has called him.

“They certainly had asked me about it over the eight years my brother was in office,” he said.

“Everybody wants a pardon. When you get out of prison and you’ve done your time and all the paperwork and you’ve been a productive, beneficial part of society and you’ve obeyed the law, you’re entitled to it.”

But, he said, “I told them all along. I told them all along that I never had the pen” to sign the pardons.

“I cried about a couple of days. I was in an emotional funk. I didn’t know how to feel.”

He said he told his brother that he would forgo a pardon for himself if the president would grant clemency to his friends.

“It was so important to me that these people on the list, that they get it and not me. I guess he didn’t think so.”

Sen. Clinton’s campaign treasurer, New York attorney William Cunningham III, said he received $4,000 for helping two men file expedited pardon applications with the White House and the Justice Department on Jan. 12--a week before Clinton left office.

Cunningham said that the clients--Jim Manning and Robert Clinton Fain, both of Arkansas--were referred to him by his law partner, Harold M. Ickes, a longtime supporter and advisor to both the president and Mrs. Clinton.

Harry Thomason, a longtime Arkansas friend of the Clinton family, knew both Manning and Fain and referred them to Ickes, who then sent them to Cunningham, Cunningham said.

But Cunningham insisted that there was nothing untoward about the process.

Robert S. Bennett, a Washington lawyer representing Thomason, said his client did not benefit in the referral.

Times staff writer Mike Clary in Florida contributed to this story.