Interesting argument that Bush's attempt to revoke the pardon he granted to a Republican donor is ineffective:
The only argument the White House offered is that Toussie never received a paper copy of an individual warrant from the Office of the Pardon Attorney. All indications are that the administration cooked up this theory for this case. The master warrant that Bush signed and sealed did not say that he was ordering the pardon attorney to issue individual pardons on his behalf. It said that the people on the list were hereby pardoned. When the office called the recipients, it didn't tell them that the pardon was in the mail; it told them that they had been pardoned. And they accepted. ...
On his way out of office, President Bill Clinton pardoned more than a hundred people, including his brother, his longtime associate Susan McDougal, former housing secretary Henry Cisneros and, infamously, the financier Marc Rich. Because of the volume of Clinton's last-minute pardon jamboree, there was no way to deliver all of the individual warrants before George W. Bush took office. Some of them still have not been physically delivered.
But as president, Bush never purported to have the power to revoke any of these pardons. Surely he would have unpardoned Rich if he could have. And if Bush were right about Isaac Toussie, then he could have unpardoned both him and Rich. But he wasn't, and he couldn't.
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