Spin Cycle

In an informative story this morning about Bill Clinton's sentence commutation for cocaine dealer Carlos Vignali (right), son of a politically connected LA businessman who spread money around to politicians and hired Hillary Clinton's brother, the LATimes notes that the clemency could be a problem for AG nominee Eric Holder (left) as well as likely USTR nominee Rep. Xavier Becerra of California.

Becerra had gotten $15,000 in donations from Vignali's father, and sent a letter to the WH supporting the commutation. Holder, already under fire for recommending and facilitating the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, also played a role in the Vignali case:

"Holder was Clinton's deputy attorney general at the time of the clemency order. The Justice Department's pardon attorney recommended that Clinton not commute the sentence, but Holder did not sign the letter to the White House.

"Holder has denied any wrongdoing. He declined to comment Thursday night. But a transition official said complaints about the former judge and prosecutor amounted to partisan sniping by Republicans.

"...This and other controversial pardons and commutations occurred while Holder was in charge of the department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, which reviews requests for pardons and commutations and passes along recommendations to the White House.

"Pardon Attorney Roger Adams felt strongly that the department should be on record as opposing a commutation for Vignali, in concurrence with the prosecutors who had convicted him. Holder's failure to sign the Pardon Office's recommendation against clemency meant it went to the White House with the signature of a civil servant, giving the rejection recommendation less weight.

"A 2002 congressional report by a Republican-led committee described Holder's handling of the matter -- including his failure to follow the Justice Department's usual process by signing the recommendation -- as 'disturbing.'

"It criticized Holder for 'refusing to go on the record against a commutation the president apparently wanted to grant and the president's own brother-in-law supported.'

"The report suggested that Holder did so to please his superiors in the White House while trying to maintain his credibility as a prosecutor serious about law and order.

" 'Carlos Vignali satisfies none of the appropriate grounds for commutation identified in Justice Department regulations,' according to the report.

"Holder's signature on the recommendation was not required, the report noted. But the referral came at a time when the White House was complaining to Justice Department officials about receiving too many clemency applications with recommendations that they be denied.

" 'Apparently, he didn't want to sign any more pardon denials,' Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), the chairman of the House investigative committee, said at the time. 'He was the deputy attorney general, and he didn't want to sign a memo opposing a pardon of a major drug dealer. Why?'

"An Obama transition official, Stephanie Cutter, said Thursday: 'Dan Burton's allegations are false. In his distinguished career in public service, Eric Holder has earned the support of prosecutors, law enforcement officials, and leaders of both parties because of his record of integrity.'

"A second official with the Obama transition team said that Holder 'doesn't have any great recollection of this. It's one of a million documents that went past his desk. We would love to give a detailed response, but this is an 8-year-old case and we are trying to put together the facts.' "

The Vignali clemency was a rotten, poorly researched commutation that favored a guy on the upper rung of a drug pyramid who had connections while leaving lower-downs to rot in jail. Even the sentencing judge was outraged when he found out what Clinton had done.

While Dan Burton was about as partisan a Republican as there was, the troubling aspect of Holder's role is that it was consistent with his role in the Marc Rich case -- he knew what his line prosecutors wanted, he knew they were right, and he was too spineless to stand up for them.

There is another troubling aspect to this story -- the suggestion that Obama picked Holder to be AG without even reviewing or vetting his role in a series of scandalous pardons, and now the facts don't matter. Team Obama will pretend that a guy who backed a scummy pardon and looked the other way on another one is some paragon of "integrity" and cast criticism as "sniping" by "Republicans."

This is a campaign tactic. But the campaign is over. So we now see in the defense of Eric Holder, for the first time, that Obama's team is ready to distort facts and villify critics to discredit a criticism that they admit they haven't even researched. That seems a little old.

Some of the people criticizing Holder are NOT Republicans. They are people who don't want an Attorney General whose legal thinking is so muddled that he thinks it's a good idea to offer pardons to fugitives from justice.

Just because Barack Obama decides he wants to push through an ethically challenged AG, that doesn't mean that everyone else has to suspend their capacity for rational thought.