Clinton, who remained awake throughout his entire final night as president, did not give the list his final approval until mid-morning, immediately before it was made public. Sources from both the Clinton White House and the Justice Department said the final list emerged from a frenzied and secretive process in which the outgoing president brooded over several prominent names until early yesterday morning. Some of his wide-ranging pardons provoked swift denunciation, although relatives of people whose prison sentences he lifted praised him lavishly. Through some of his pardons, Clinton appeared to be tying up loose ends from many of the independent counsel investigations that had daunted him and several senior members of his administration virtually from the beginning of his tenure. Taken together, the pardons were a dramatic final gesture for a president whose tenure was marred by his own legal controversies - and who had reached an agreement with prosecutors only one day earlier to ward off any possibility of his own indictment. Similarly, Clinton did not pardon Webster Hubbell, a former law partner of Hillary Clinton, or Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former Navy analyst who pleaded guilty to spying for Israel. The outgoing president decided not to pardon junk bond trader Michael Milken or Leonard Peltier, a Native American leader convicted in the shooting deaths of a pair of FBI agents. The 140 pardons and 36 commuted prison sentences are as notable for those omitted as for those Clinton forgave. Fife Symington III, who was facing a retrial on charges of real estate fraud, and John Deutch, who was in the midst of negotiating a plea agreement with the Justice Department over security violations while he directed the CIA. In a rare move, Clinton also pardoned two former government officials who have not even been convicted: ex-Arizona governor J. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and an array of drug offenders serving long prison terms under mandatory sentencing laws. Capitol a woman who illegally gave an eagle feather to Sen. Other beneficiaries of Clinton's generosity include an international financier and indicted fugitive, Marc Rich a leftist radical convicted of conspiring to bomb the U.S. The mistress, political fundraiser Linda Jones, yesterday was granted a pardon, too. Clinton pardoned his former secretary of housing and urban development, Henry Cisneros, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about how much money he had given a former mistress. The extraordinary list, eclipsing in magnitude and scope the last-minute legal forgiveness dispensed by previous presidents, includes Susan McDougal, who was convicted of bank fraud in the Whitewater case, then went to prison for refusing to say whether Clinton had testified truthfully at her trial. Just two hours before surrendering the White House, President Clinton gave parting gifts that lifted 176 Americans out of legal trouble, granting pardons to figures from the Whitewater scandal, former Cabinet members, an ex-governor, onetime fugitive heiress Patricia Hearst Shaw and his own brother, Roger Clinton.
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