Bill and Hillary Clinton have always maintained a hygienic distance between their scandals, like His and Hers towels. He had Monica; she had cattle futures. He rented out the Lincoln Bedroom; she emptied out the Travel Office. Whitewater had separate plot lines: his lost memory, her lost billing records. And for a month, it looked as if the 177 clemencies Clinton granted in his final days were falling neatly into the His column. But last week it became clear that U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White was investigating some that have signs of being community property--the commuted sentences of four members of a Hasidic sect following a meeting, which Hillary attended, between sect leaders and her husband.
There is not much you can do to an ex-President. The realists know it's too late to impeach him and too hard to indict him, since bribery is a difficult charge to prove. But with the news of a broader investigation, the focus of the scandal expands to include not just the Clinton who is worried about his legacy but also the one who is worried about her future. So many of the people who were pardoned had connections to New York that it was only a matter of time before the spotlight expanded from the former President to the sitting Senator.
Not that it wasn't breathtaking to watch a shiny new ex-presidency disappear under a freak mud slide. The debris hurtled by so fast that the New York Times editorial page seemed to run out of synonyms for disgust, revulsion and abuse. Jimmy Carter, the perfect ex-President, broke the cardinal rule of the brotherhood and called Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich "disgraceful." Even Terry McAuliffe, the former President's friend, said that decision had been wrong. Perhaps worst of all, there seemed to be no end to the bodies that might float down the swollen river. Congressional investigators subpoenaed another Clinton fund raiser, Beth Dozoretz, to tell all she knows about his pardon of Rich, the billionaire fugitive living in Switzerland.
And shattering any doubt that Clinton's pardons were shaped like boomerangs was the news, broken by the newspaper of record in the Clinton era, the National Enquirer, that Hillary's brother Hugh Rodham had made $400,000 for helping broker a commutation for a Los Angeles drug dealer and a pardon for a Florida swindler. That changed everything. "The brother showed up on the scene and put her right in the middle of it," says an aide to the House Democratic leadership. Suddenly, talk of a Clinton restoration to the White House seemed more far-fetched than ever. "The 2004 thing was never real," the aide says. "Certainly not now."
The criminal investigation could eventually spread to include any or all the pardons granted in the final daze of Clinton's second term. It seems that anyone who ever knew, talked to or met Bill Clinton in his first 54 years made some kind of last-minute pardon appeal to the President for a friend, relative or spouse. A lot of those pleaders were well heeled or working for folks who were. And so the matter of who got paid for doing all these good deeds--and whether that payment was in dollars or votes, now or later--could keep a prosecutor busy for months if not years.