Posted by JetMoses

This is an excerpt from The Case Against Hillary Clinton, by Peggy Noonan.

You’d think lies, especially the political lies of practiced liars, would be subtle. But theirs are not. There are many examples. Consider just one: the events surrounding the freeing of the sixteen FALN terrorists whose sentences President Clinton commuted on August 11, 1999. For ten years starting in 1974 two terrorist groups wanting independence for Puerto Rico—the FALN and another, smaller group—waged a campaign of violence in the United States. They carried out more than a hundred bombings, which killed six people and wounded scores of others. In time sixteen defendants were arrested; the indictments brought against them linked them to violent crimes; they were convicted on charges ranging from armed robbery to weapons violations to sedition. All sixteen were believed to have been involved in the terror campaign and all received heavy sentences.

Puerto Rican activists had long pressed for their release, but the terrorists themselves remained unrepentant. The activist began asking President Clinton to release the FALN-ers in 1993, as soon as he took office. He took action on their requests in August 1999.

Why then? Why at all?

He said that the reason for his decision was that the terrorists’ sentences were too long under current sentencing guidelines. But the staff director of the US Sentencing Commission soon said that wasn’t so; the terrorists could have been tried for treason and received life sentences.

Did the president grant clemency because disinterested professionals in the justice system urged him to? No, they opposed it. The president granted clemency over the unanimous objections of the FBI, whose director, Louis Freeh, warned the president in a memo that the terrorists were unrepentant and likely to return to terrorism if freed; the US Bureau of Prisons; and two US Attorneys. (Newsweek later reported that the Bureau of Prisons had audiotapes of some of the terrorists saying that they planned to continue their terror campaign if they were ever freed.)

Was it compassion for the prisoners that motivated the president? Clinton is not known for this particular kind of compassion; he had used the power of presidential pardon only twice in seven years. As governor, he had even allowed a retarded man, Ricky Ray Rector, to be put to death in Arkansas in 1992 rather than face what he imagined would be political heat in the presidential race for being soft on crime. (Ray’s execution took place during the Gennifer Flowers scandal, and it has been speculated that the former was meant to take the spotlight off the latter.) There is reason to believe the president associates pardons with politics.

So why did Bill Clinton all of a sudden decide to grant clemency?

The most obvious answer is the most widely held: He was thinking of Hillary’s election prospects in New York, which has a high percentage of Puerto Rican voters. Dick Morris, who worked for the Clintons on and off for twenty years, said, “Anyone who doesn’t believe the timing, and likely the substance, of Bill’s decision was linked to Hillary’s courtship of New York’s large Puerto Rican vote is too naïve for politics.”

There is so much evidence to support this view, but one small and I suspect not unimportant piece has not previously been addressed in the clemency coverage. It was an appearance on CNBC by Clinton friend and defender Geraldo Rivera in February of 1999, when the first rumors of a Hillary candidacy were beginning to float. Rivera excitedly told a story. He said that he had just talked with the president on the phone and had told him, “You know, I’d like to invite the first lady to march with me in this summer’s Puerto Rican Day parade up Fifth Avenue… a million and a half people lining both sides of the streets.” Bill Clinton, he said, was very interested. “The president instantly said, ‘I think she’d like that.’ And then, as if to emphasize it, he said, ‘I think she’d like that’ a second time.”

This suggested to Rivera that the rumors of a candidacy were true, and the president was excited about ideas for how to win.

It was six months after this conversation that the president granted clemency to the terrorists. Is it too bold to speculate that that magical number—one and a half million Puerto Rican voters—sparked or sealed his decision?

TO BE CONTINUED

Part 2 HERE