Legal News

Pardon Goes Awry, Thanks to White House Counsel?s Advice

By Dan Slater

In what the L.A. Times is calling an “unprecedented move,” President Bush dis-invited Isaac Toussie to the Pardon Party. The revocation, which was announced Wednesday, came just 24 hours after Bush had issued the pardon for the Brooklyn-based real estate developer.

Fred Fielding, Counselor to President Bush, in the East Room of the White House, March 3, 2008. (AP/Charles Dharapak)

Toussie, 37, was convicted after admitting that he falsified financial information of potential home buyers seeking mortgages backed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 2003, he was sentenced to five months in prison, five months of house detention and a $10,000 fine.

Reportedly, about 460 home buyers — most of them lower-income African Americans — have sued Toussie, alleging that he sold defective homes and engaged in predatory lending practices. They’re repped by Milberg’s Peter Seidman.

According to reports in the L.A.T. and the New York Times, the reversal came after it was discovered that Toussie’s father, Robert, donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee last April. He also donated $2,300 to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain. The L.A.T. also noted that the pardon threatened to embarrass Bush because Toussie bypassed normal procedures and took his case directly to the West Wing, hiring a former top lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, Bradford Berenson, who had access to the president’s most senior advisors. (Sidley Austin’s Berenson made an LB appearance in September for his representation of Kyle Sampson, who, as former AG Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff, carried out the controversial sackings of eight of the nine fired U.S. attorneys in 2006.)

White House officials confirmed to the L.A.T that Berenson had brought the case to the office of White House Counsel Fred Fielding. A White House statement said Fielding had “reviewed the application and believed, based on the information known to him at the time, that it was a meritorious application. He so advised the president, who accepted the recommendation.” Berenson, citing attorney-client privilege, declined to comment to the L.A.T. about his role in bypassing the DOJ and taking the case directly to the White House. The Law Blog’s call to Berenson’s office was not immediately returned.

Margaret Love, who was the lead pardon attorney under President George H.W. Bush and for part of the Clinton administration, told the L.A.T.: “I can’t think of another time that it’s happened for a presidential pardon. It’s not clear to me that it’s as easy to do as all that.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 26, 2008 (boomark / email).