WASHINGTON, March 3 — It was after dark last Thursday by the time Lewis Libby, a top official
in the Bush White House, reluctantly began testifying before the House committee investigating the
11th-hour pardons granted by former President Bill Clinton.

Most of the committee members were gone.

Even Dan Burton excused himself, handed over his gavel to a colleague and headed down the
hallway for an appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live."

But though the hour was late, Democratic lawmakers relished the chance to question Mr. Libby,
a Republican lawyer who is one of many members of the bar to have represented Marc Rich,
the fugitive commodities trader who received Mr. Clinton's most contentious pardon.

Mr. Libby, now chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, squirmed, clearly uncomfortable
to be sitting in the hot seat in an investigation run by his political allies.

His testimony revealed little about how Mr. Rich won his pardon, and Republicans had
worked behind the scenes to spare him from appearing at all.

But by calling him, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the committee's ranking Democrat,
sought to make a point: Mr. Clinton may have been irresponsible in issuing his final sheaf
of pardons, but Republicans do not have completely clean hands on the issue.

During the hearing, Mr. Waxman cited the case of Orlando Bosch, suspected of being a
terrorist from Cuba, who was released from jail in 1990 by former President George Bush.

Jeb Bush  had lobbied for Mr. Bosch's release, which had become a cause célèbre
among Cuban-Americans in South Florida.

"We aren't investigating former President Bush or his son, just former President Clinton
and his brother-in-law," Mr. Waxman complained.

Republicans accused Mr. Waxman of merely trying to muddy the waters as the committeelooked
at what they called clear-cut abuses by the Mr. Clinton. And Mr. Waxman's focus on pardons past
was largely lost in the hours upon hours of testimony on more recent grants of clemency.

"I find nothing enlightening in the ranking member's discussion of things that are utterly
irrelevant to this investigation," Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia, said.
"We've sort of learned to come to expect that."

Experts who have studied the pardon process say presidents from each party have
granted pardons that raised an uproar at the time.

"The great bulk of presidential pardons, over the 214-year history of the Constitution,
have been dispensed with an appropriate level of caution, leading to only rare assertions of abuse,"
Ken Gormley, a constitutional law professor at Duquesne University, testified last month before
the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It is true that controversies inevitably erupt with respect to certain
politically charged pardons. Yet the passage of time often softens the light in which they are viewed."

The Bosch case was not the only one that Mr. Waxman raised as he sought to turn the tables on
Republican investigators in what has become the Democrats' tried-and-true technique for trying to
trip up the many inquiries started by Mr. Burton, Republican of Indiana.

Mr. Waxman said he found the pardon of Armand Hammer just as suspicious as that of Mr. Rich.
In 1989, former President Bush pardoned Mr. Hammer, the former head of Occidental Petroleum
who had pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions. Mr. Hammer was a major GOP donor.
Shortly before he received the pardon, he gave more than $100,000 to the Republican Party and
$100,000 to the Bush-Quayle Inaugural Committee.

"The appearance of a quid pro quo is just as strong in the Hammer case as in the Rich case,
if not stronger, since Mr. Hammer himself gave the contribution," Mr. Waxman said.

In the case of Mr. Rich, it was his former wife, Denise, who was both a pardon advocate and
major donor — she gave $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.

Mr. Waxman called on Mr. Burton to subpoena the library records of the Republican administrations
to look into potential abuses.

Mr. Burton did not take him up on his offer.

"I was turned down," Mr. Waxman said. "It seems we can pursue President Clinton's library,
but not President Bush's or President Reagan's."

While Mr. Burton's investigators were trying to track evidence showing nefarious dealings in the
days leading up to Mr. Clinton's last batch of pardons, Mr. Waxman's staff was looking back to
the days when Republicans held the White House.

They gathered information on George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees who was pardoned
by former President Ronald Reagan in 1989.

Mr. Steinbrenner had pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to violate federal election laws.
He hired two prominent Republican lawyers to press his case. Just as in the Rich case,
the main prosecutors were not consulted about the pardon.

And just as the Rich case featured former presidential aides pressing their former boss,
so did some Republican presidents' grants of clemency.

In the case of Gilbert L. Dozier, a former Louisiana agriculture commissioner accused of fund-raising abuses,
a former Reagan aide, Lyn Nofziger, met with Associate Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen to press for a
commutation. Mr. Dozier also hired other former Nixon administration officials, as well as John Stanish,
who had been the pardon attorney under President Carter.

Republican investigators criticized the clemency granted by Mr. Clinton to Carlos Vignali,
a drug smuggler whose application was pushed by the president's brother-in- law Hugh Rodham.

Democrats, for their part, were ready with a drug case of their own. Former President Bush pardoned
Aslam Adam, a Pakistani drug trafficker who had served eight years of a 55-year sentence in federal prison
in North Carolina. Prosecutors had opposed Mr. Vignali's pardon, and they had opposed the pardon
of Mr. Adam, who was convicted of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute $1 million worth of heroin.