Washington: Only days before the presidential election, the FBI released an archive of documents from a long-closed investigation into former president Bill Clinton’s 2001 presidential pardon of a fugitive financier, prompting questions from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign about its timing.
The 129 pages of heavily censored material about Bill Clinton’s presidential pardon of Marc Rich were published on the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act webpage.
Rich was charged with multiple counts of tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and cutting petroleum deals with Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis.
He was in Switzerland when he was indicted, and never returned to the United States. He passed away in 2013.
Pardoning Rich on his last day in office turned out to be one of Bill Clinton’s most controversial acts of president. By bringing the episode back up so close to election day has put the case back on the front burner.
