Change you can believe in!
The former prosecutor whom President-elect Barack Obama wants to run the Justice Department bypassed the agency's career lawyers during one of the most controversial final decisions made by President Clinton in January 2001 — the pardon of billionaire fugitive financier Marc Rich, congressional records show.
Eric H. Holder Jr., then the deputy attorney general, worked with former White House Counsel Jack Quinn to ensure that department officials — particularly federal prosecutors in New York who handled the Rich case — "did not have the opportunity to express an opinion on the Rich pardon before it was granted," the Republican-led House Government Reform Committee concluded in a 467-page report in 2002.
The committee's evidence included an e-mail in which Mr. Holder told Mr. Quinn to "go straight" to the White House and that the "timing is good" for Mr. Rich's request for a pardon. Normally, pardon requests are reviewed by career prosecutors before a recommendation is forwarded to the White House.
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