Jack Quinn obituary, White House insider behind ‘pardongate’ (2024)

Bill Clinton’s presidency ended with one final scandal: on January 20, 2001, the very day that he left office, he pardoned Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and had escaped justice by living in Switzerland for 17 years. Rich owed his reprieve to one man above all, a consummate Washington insider named Jack Quinn.

In 1983, Rich had been charged with breaching United Nations sanctions by secretly buying oil from Iran while Iranian revolutionaries were holding hostage the 52 Americans they had seized from the US embassy in Tehran. He had fled to Switzerland, where he lived in munificent exile, but by the end of the 1990s he wanted to come home, and paid Quinn a reported $400,000 to arrange it.

Quinn was a lawyer and lobbyist who had worked as chief of staff to Al Gore, the vice-president, in the early 1990s, and as Clinton’s White House counsel from 1995 to 1997. He and his third wife, Susanna, were fixtures on Washington’s social circuit. Charming and personable, he knew everyone in the US capital’s proverbial corridors of power, and he set to work.

He sought and failed to get a deal with the New York US Attorney’s Office, which had brought the original charges, so he set his sights higher. Bypassing the deeply sceptical Justice Department, he decided to lobby Clinton directly for a presidential pardon even though, as the president’s counsel, he had proposed barring senior White House officials from lobbying their former colleagues for five years after leaving office.

He persuaded Rich’s former wife, Denise, to write an emotional plea to the outgoing president. She had given nearly $1.4 million to Democratic causes, including $450,000 for Clinton’s presidential library.

He prepared a book of testimonials from top Israeli politicians who had benefited from Rich’s largesse. They included the former prime ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak. The Los Angeles Times described it as “thicker than a big-city phone book”.

He crafted the legal case for a pardon, arguing that Rich’s alleged offences were civil not criminal, and that he was not really a fugitive as he had flown to Switzerland before his indictment and had simply never returned.

Time was running out. Two days before Clinton left office Quinn wrote the president a hand-delivered letter, saying Rich was prepared to accept any civil liabilities arising from his conduct. On Clinton’s final night in the White House Quinn talked to him by telephone. The next morning, in one of his last acts as president, Clinton included Rich on the list of 140 people he pardoned before leaving to attend George W Bush’s inauguration on Capitol Hill.

It proved a hugely controversial decision and prompted various investigations, but Quinn had somehow delivered the apparently impossible for his client.

John Michael Quinn, known as Jack, was a creature of Washington DC. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1949, the son of a power plant manager, and raised on Long Island. From a Jesuit high school in Manhattan he went to Georgetown University in Washington — the first member of his family to attend college.

There he earned a degree in government in 1971 and a law degree in 1975, but even as a student he immersed himself in politics. He skipped classes to work on Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968, on the staff of the US Senate committee on nutrition and human needs, and as an aide to the senators George McGovern and Floyd Haskell.

In 1976, aged 26, he ran the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Mo Udall, a congressman from Arizona. The same year, he joined the prestigious Washington law firm of Arnold & Porter, rising during the 1980s to become head of its lobbying department.

He worked on several Democratic senators’ unsuccessful presidential bids — Edward Kennedy’s in 1980, Gary Hart’s in 1984, Al Gore’s in 1988 and Bob Kerrey’s in 1992. Later in 1992, after Clinton had named Gore as his running mate, Quinn became the Tennessee senator’s campaign counsel and communications director.

When Clinton won the White House, Gore, the new vice-president, made Quinn his deputy chief of staff, and later chief of staff. But by 1995 Clinton had already run through three White House counsels, so he tapped Quinn for the job.

It was a poisoned chalice. Quinn found himself dealing with multiple controversies besetting Clinton including the Whitewater affair, the strange death of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, and the sacking of the White House travel office staff. Quinn “defended the president with vigour”, according to The Washington Post. At one point he narrowly escaped congressional contempt proceedings for refusing to hand over internal White House documents.

Quinn left the White House at the beginning of Clinton’s second term, in 1997, and returned to Arnold & Porter. In 2000 he met Ed Gillespie, a senior Republican strategist, while they were waiting to appear opposite each other on a Fox News talk show, and they agreed to set up a bipartisan lobbying company, which they sold for a reported $40 million four years later. Their clients included banks and tech companies, the failed energy company Enron, and Marc Rich.

Thereafter Quinn continued to practice law while simultaneously working as CNN’s legal analyst. His later clients included families bereaved by the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, and he was instrumental in persuading Congress to pass legislation allowing them to sue Saudi Arabia for its alleged involvement. That was the only time Congress overrode a veto by President Obama.

Quinn was divorced twice before marrying Susanna Monroney, the granddaughter of an Oklahoma senator, in 2007. He had seven children in all, and a stepchild.

He once said of his presence at the White House: “The hot air index is actually down when people like me go on vacation.”

John Quinn, lawyer and White House counsel, was born on August 16, 1949. He died from complications resulting from a double lung transplant on May 8, 2024, aged 74