Marc Rich's pardon was very controversial, and Clinton said later that he shouldn't have done it. Rich, who seems to have been pretty much of a sleazebag, had been indicted for income tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and trading with Iran during the oil embargo (on charges brought by Rudy Giuliani, of all people, when he was a US Attorney). Fearing arrest, Rich left the country. In defending the pardon, Clinton claimed he'd received requests for clemency for Rich from a number Israeli government officials. Clinton did not go through all the customary procedures before granting the pardon, but as a condition of the pardon Rich agreed to drop all procedural defenses against any civil actions brought against him by the United States. A subsequent investigation found no wrongdoing by Clinton.
In a February 18, 2001 op-ed essay in The New York Times, Clinton (by then out of office) explained why he had pardoned Rich, noting that U.S. tax professors Bernard Wolfman of the Harvard Law School and Martin Ginsburg of Georgetown University Law Center had concluded that no crime had been committed, and that Rich's companies' tax-reporting position had been reasonable. In the same essay, Clinton listed Lewis "Scooter" Libby as one of three "distinguished Republican lawyers" who supported a pardon for Rich. (Libby himself later received a presidential commutation for his involvement in the Plame affair.) During Congressional hearings after Rich's pardon, Libby, who had represented Rich from 1985 until the spring of 2000, denied that Rich had violated the tax laws but criticized him for trading with Iran at a time when that country was holding U.S. hostages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich
Clinton probably shouldn't have pardoned Rich, but at least he was able to offer credible reasons for having done so. The major difference between the Rich pardon and the Arpaio pardon is that Arpaio was pardoned for the crime of willfully violating a court order arising from claims that, as a law enforcement officer, he violated the civil rights of Latino people with absolutely no justification. And Trump did it only because he wanted to throw red meat to his racist base. Clinton pardoned Rich on the recommendation of other people and under the belief that he had a reasonable basis for claiming his innocence. It may not have been a god decision but it wasn't an in-your-face fuck-you to the judicial branch.
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