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When a few weeks ago Colombian president Andres Pastrana was preparing his trip to Washington to discuss with President Bush the continuing fight against the perverse alliance of drug producers and leftist guerrillas that is threatening his country's very existence as a nation, he surely did not have in mind a man by the name of Harvey Weinig, a Manhattan lawyer who had pleaded guilty to participating in one of the largest drug money-laundering cases in New York history — helping the Cali cartel. As far as the Colombian authorities knew, he was serving an 11-year prison term — which was not long enough, they felt.
But Colombian newspapers, scanning the list of 176 people who were pardoned or had sentences commuted by President Clinton on his last day in office came up with Weinig's name. His sentence commuted to five years by Clinton, he was to be released immediately from prison.
They soon found out in Colombia — by now in all Latin American countries — that it was no random selection that had sprung Weinig loose. They learned that a former Clinton aide who is a Weinig relative had put in a good word for him with top administration officials in the president's waning days, and a lawyer who had represented many administration officials was hired to press his case.
The U.S. attorney's office in New York that had prosecuted Weinig bitterly opposed the commutation, and officials at the Justice Department's headquarters in Washington weighed in against it as well. And there was no doubt that justice had been done: he had been sentenced in 1996 after pleading guilty to two counts in connection with the money-laundering case.
People familiar with the White House deliberations say the president was swayed by a packet of materials prepared by Weinig's lawyer that described in detail the emotionally shattering impact his imprisonment had on his family, in particular his two teenage sons.
"There's no question the president was moved by arguments of humanitarianism," said Reid Weingarten, Weinig's attorney. "A commutation of Harvey Weinig's sentence was justified."
"It was done on the basis of a humanitarian plea that was made to us by someone we knew who had rendered good public service and was a relative of Mr. Weinig," Clinton's chief of staff John Podesta said on NBC News's "Meet the Press." "Some of the people in the office thought it was a bad call, that it tilted the other way, but for me it was a close call and, on a humanitarian basis, I recommended it to the president, and he granted it."
Weinig's appeal certainly was helped by the easy access his lawyer, Weingarten, enjoyed at the White House. Having represented former agriculture secretary Mike Espy in his corruption trial, and other high-ranking Clinton aides, Weingarten knew many top administration officials. After prosecutors shot down his clemency petition, he took it to White House counsel Beth Nolan and deputy counsel Bruce Lindsey, one of the president's closest friends.
But the strongest arguments for Weinig were advanced by David Dreyer, who was deputy White House communications director in Clinton's first term and was later a top aide to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin. Weinig is Dreyer's cousin by marriage, and the two have been close for years. He spoke about his relative to Nolan's and Podesta's staffs.
"Harvey is a good person who was extremely involved in the lives of his sons," said Dreyer, now a corporate consultant, summarizing the arguments he made to his former colleagues. "No one's saying Harvey didn't commit any crimes and didn't make any mistakes."
Never mind Marc Rich, the fugitive American billionaire. Never mind Carlos Vignali, the California cocaine impresario. Instantly, Weinig became Latin America's favorite clemency icon.
"This situation is quite disappointing and delivers the wrong message," Alfonso Valdivieso, Colombia's ambassador to the United Nations and a former top narcotics prosecutor, said in a radio interview. In a column in Bogota's leading daily, El Espectador, Colombia's former justice minister Enrique Parejo called the Clinton decision as "extremely grave and unheard-of." Former Colombian prosecutor Gustavo De Greiff accused Clinton of a double standard, because his administration pressured Colombia into abandoning its policy of offering reduced sentences to drug traffickers who gave themselves in. "Demoralizing for the countries that are in the fight against drugs" is what former government minister Fernando Cepeda said about Clinton's clemency.
But editorials in practically all leading newspapers in Latin America went beyond condemning Clinton personally for commuting Harvey Weinig's sentence, suggesting his action was nothing more than a reflection of the U.S. attitude of not facing squarely its responsibility as the nation with the largest drug consumption in the world.