I’m probably the last person on earth to clue into this, but I was reading coverage of the commutation (just keep polishing that legacy, George) and was struck by a bizarre fact from the It’s A Small World Department.
In the furor over Bush’s decision, one of the things various parties are at pains to accomplish is to prove that Bush’s commutation is more/less evil than Clinton’s last-minute pardons, most notably the pardon of “fugitive financier” Marc Rich.
The article referred back to hearings held in the first minutes of the Bush administration, looking into Rich’s and others’ pardons.
At those hearings, way back in 2001, a man who had worked as Rich’s lawyer defended the pardon, saying prosecutors had “misconstrued the facts and the law.”
That lawyer’s name?