If the father had donated $400,000 to Republicans, this wouldn't be an issue.

If the father hadn't donated 400k to republicans there wouldn't have been a pardon - at all.

I'm sure Bush will want to make this a one day story by releasing all contacts he and his staff had with Toussie and his lawyers. Right?

I'm struck by how different this is from earlier in his presidency. There is no way the 2005 White House rescinds the pardon.

Personally I think this reflects more on the incompetent people that Bush has surrounded himself with than it does on him personally. I mean, since when does Bush ever back down in the face of the appearance of impropriety? It just isn't done...the boy just don't have it in him.

I think someone took a payoff and figured he could slip this one past because Toussie just wasn't that high profile. When Bush found out the whole story he tried to do the right thing. It could happen. It is a "once in a Blue Moon" kinda thing in this WH, but it does happen.

"If the father had donated $400,000 to Republicans, this wouldn't be an issue." by jen

"If the father hadn't donated 400k to republicans there wouldn't have been a pardon - at all." by Chistor

It was not 400K it was 40K. This is quite a bit less. It seems to me quite a bargain. Usually with dealing with a criminally inclined political administration the prices are much higher.

If the president can rescind a pardon, so could his successor.

I think that the Toussie pardon may be a done deal. Is the attempt to rescind it just to deal with the public outrage?

If the president can rescind a pardon, so could his successor.

It's clear that a pardon cannot be rescinded once accomplished--the question is whether Bush had completed the pardon process. The pardon had been announced, but not all the documents had been signed or delviered. There's a post Civil War case suggesting that a pardon isn't ocmplete until delivered and accepted, and a post-WWI case suggesting the contrary, and both cases involved rather different facts. No one will know the answer until the Supreme Court rules on this case.

Regardless of whether he can or can't, this seems tied to the Eric Holder nomination, doesn't it?

White House approves shady pardon as payback for contribution, Senate Republicans remind him they're trying to derail the AG nomination, White House willing to look foolish since their term is now measured in days and reverses itself.

I believe Lord Occam would say this is typical Bush Administration incompetence at work.

Two points: TPM has done some analysis of whether a president can "revoke" a pardon. It appears that the issue is not as clear as one might expect. Expect Toussie to fight this issue. Second, I believe that Berenson went to Harvard Law School with Barack Obama, considers him a friend and has a high opinion of Obama.

Hey just carrying on the family tradition of pardons of terrorists and criminals like bush senior did

A Known Terrorist Living Among Us

Orlando Bosch is the perpetrator of a 1976 bombing of a Cubana airplane carrying seventy-three civilians who were all killed. This was the world's first terrorist action involving the bombing of a civilian airliner. Bosch was recruited, trained, and supported by the CIA. He was then pardoned by the previous Bush administration, and to this day walks freely through the streets of Miami.

Bosch, had been serving a prison sentence but was freed as the result of a campaign launched by Jeb Bush and his right-wing Cuban supporters in Florida. The terrorist activities of Orlando Bosch are fully documented in the book Deadly Secrets by Warren Hinkle and William Turner, who in turn drew their information from a Senate investigation led by Senator Kerry into the activities of the CIA. Evidence showed that the bomb was placed by Cuban-American mercenaries, in the pay of the US Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. The two terrorists who admitted that they placed the bomb on the Cubana flight—Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch—are currently free, receiving refuge in the United States.

According to the New York Time of August 17, 1989, Cuban right-wing congressperson Ros-Lehtinen met with former President Bush to negotiate Bosch's release. The meeting was arranged by her campaign manager, Jeb Bush, who had earlier met with Cuban hunger strikers also demanding the release. Bosch was pardoned on July 18, 1990 and the New York Times was the lonely voice denouncing Bush's pardon on an editorial published July 20, 1990.

Bosch was a cohort of Posada Carriles, a Cuban pediatrician who became a world renowned terrorist for the CIA. Carriles has taken claim for the recent wave of hotel bombings in Havana, Cuba. Both men were trained together at Fort Benning, Georgia. Bosch was the founder of the "Command of the United Revolutionary Organizations" formed to cooperate with the DINA Chilean secret police and other Latin American repressive organisms in the murder of leftists throughout the region, including the assassination of the Chilean ambassador, Letelier, in Washington, DC.

The US government has repeatedly declined to extradite Bosch to Cuba to stand trial for the bombing of the Cubana airliner in 1976. Probably because Bosch would prove very embarrassing for the US at a trial in Cuba and his extradition would destroy the close political relationship between the exile Cubans who demanded his release and the Republican Party.

By its own admission, and as reported by U.S. Congressional committees, the United States has supported or condoned hundreds of violent acts, including plane hijackings, biological warfare, sabotage, murders, and attempted assassinations. It continues to provide immunity and safe-haven to the perpetrators of violent, terrorist acts against Cuba and other nations. Most notoriously though is the case of Orlando Bosch, a man so known for his propensity for terrorist actions that the U.S. Attorney General urged that he be deported lest the United States' credibility and security be compromised.

For more information on this subject see:

US Government Harbors a Terrorist
Decisions on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
Congressional Record the case of Joe Doherty compared to Orlando Bosch
Their Terrorists, Our Freedom Fighters

Is the attempt to rescind it just to deal with the public outrage?

Yes. If someone hadn't done the research to turn up Toussie's father's donation, and if the blogs hadn't taken it up to make a very big stink, this pardon would be on its way into his hands even now.

SOMEONE was hoping to get this one by under the radar, although it may not have been Bush himself.

OldGman -

Exactly my point. The father only donated around $30,000. If he had donated in the six figures, the pardon would not have been withdrawn.